India had won the Olympic gold medal in hockey. And the best hockey player in the world, already, was this 22 year-old Indian wizard. Only three teams played hockey at the 1932 Olympics, in Los Angeles. India beat Japan and the USA, winning gold again.

Dhyan’s younger brother Roop was also in the team by then, and together, the remarkable brothers scored 25 of India’s 35 goals. This Indian team, an American journalist wrote, was “a typhoon out of the East”.  And the storm was just getting started. In their triumphant international tour of 1932, the Indian team played 37 games and scored 338 goals. Dhyan fired home 133 of those. In 1934, it was 48 games for 584 goals, Dhyan 201.

And then came the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Germany was then in the early years of Nazi rule, under Adolf Hitler. Hitler believed that Germans were superior in every way to the rest of the world. In the years to come, he would translate that belief into some of the most horrible slaughter mankind has ever known. But in 1936, Hitler saw the Berlin Olympics as his first great chance to show off his twisted ideas to his country and the world.