Name: Ngangom Dingko Singh
Born: 1 January 1979, Sekta, Imphal East, Manipur
Died: 10 June 2021
State: Manipur
Sport: Boxing
Early life
Dingko Singh was born on 1 January 1979 in Sekta village in Manipur’s Imphal East district. He lost both his parents while still very young and was raised in an orphanage, growing up in real and lasting hardship. His path into sport came through the Sports Authority of India’s Special Area Games scheme, which sent coaches to identify athletic talent in remote parts of the country; he was picked out at an assessment camp at Khuman Lampak in Imphal over the winter of 1990-91 and formally joined the programme on 12 February 1991, training under the coach Leishangthem Ibomcha Singh. He progressed fast, winning gold in the 12-year-old category at the Sub-Junior National Boxing Championship that November, and by his early teens he was already being watched as one of the country’s more promising young boxers. Manipur had no great boxing tradition to speak of at the time, and Dingko’s progress through the SAI scheme did as much as any single result to put the state on the sport’s national map, well before the wave of Manipuri boxers who followed him.
King’s Cup and the 1998 Asian Games
Dingko made his mark internationally in 1997, winning the King’s Cup in Bangkok and being named best boxer of the tournament. The following year he was picked, after initially being left out of the squad, for the Indian boxing team at the 1998 Bangkok Asian Games, competing in the 54kg bantamweight division, a category he had only recently moved up into from 51kg. Few expected much of him going in, but he beat Thailand’s Wong Prages Sontaya in the semi-final and then met Uzbekistan’s Timur Tulyakov, ranked fifth in the world at the time, in the final. Dingko dominated the contest so completely that Tulyakov retired after the fourth round, handing India a gold medal that made Dingko Singh a household name in Indian boxing and, by his own account, an inspiration to a young M. C. Mary Kom, who took up the sport not long afterwards.
Later career
Dingko went on to represent India at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, though without repeating the success of Bangkok, as the higher weight class and deeper fields at that level proved difficult to break through. Rather than turn professional, he remained a serving member of the Indian Navy throughout his career, eventually reaching the rank of Master Chief Petty Officer 1st Class, and after retiring from competition he moved into coaching, training younger boxers in Manipur and becoming a respected figure within the Navy’s sporting set-up. He was a familiar presence at boxing camps in the state for years afterwards, passing on lessons from his own rapid, unlikely rise to boxers who had grown up idolising his 1998 win.
Illness and death
Dingko was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2017 and underwent prolonged treatment for the disease. He died on 10 June 2021, aged 42, after further complications following a COVID-19 infection. His story was due to be told in a biographical film starring Shahid Kapoor and directed by Raja Krishna Menon, though the project was shelved before completion. He remains one of the figures most closely associated with Manipur’s rise as a centre of Indian boxing, alongside the athletes, including Mary Kom, who followed the path he had opened up.
Achievements and awards
Gold medal, 54kg bantamweight, 1998 Asian Games; King’s Cup winner and best boxer of the tournament (1997); Arjuna Award (1998); Padma Shri (2013); widely credited within Indian boxing as an early inspiration for M. C. Mary Kom.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
