ABSTRACT
When Sir Dorabji Tata organized the first modern meet of Indian athletes with an eye on
the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games, he found that despite running barefoot their
performance compared ‘well with the times done in Europe or elsewhere’. Suitably
impressed, Tata personally financed three of the best runners for Antwerp, a move that in
his own words: ‘Fired the ambition of the nationalist element in the city’.
