🇮🇳 Yuvraj Singh

Yuvraj Singh was born on December 12, 1981, in Chandigarh, to Yograj Singh — a former India pace bowler who had played a single Test against New Zealand in 1981 — and Shabnam Singh. Yograj's relationship with his elder son's cricket education was, by Yuvraj's own published accounts in his 2013 memoir, intense and demanding. He pushed Yuvraj toward cricket from early childhood despite the boy's initial preference for tennis and roller skating.

Yuvraj made his India Under-19 debut in 1997 and was part of the Mohammad Kaif-captained Under-19 squad that won the 2000 Under-19 World Cup. His senior international debut was an October 2000 ODI against Kenya in Nairobi. His coming-of-age innings, two days later, was an 84 off 80 balls against Australia in the same tournament — the ICC KnockOut Trophy, later renamed the Champions Trophy.

Through the 2000s he was India's premier left-handed middle-order ODI batsman, a part-time left-arm orthodox spinner, and an outstanding cover fielder. The 2002 NatWest Series final at Lord's, in which he and Mohammad Kaif chased down 326 against England, was the innings that consolidated his ODI reputation. The six sixes against Stuart Broad in 2007 — in India's first ICC World T20, which India eventually won under the captaincy of M. S. Dhoni — was the moment that took his fame beyond cricket.

The 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup, held primarily in India, was the peak. Yuvraj scored 362 runs in nine matches at an average above 90, took 15 wickets with his left-arm spin, and was named Player of the Tournament as India won its first ODI World Cup in 28 years. The Mumbai final against Sri Lanka — the one M. S. Dhoni finished with a six over long-on — was Yuvraj's tournament's defining frame.

He was diagnosed in early 2012 with a rare mediastinal germ-cell cancer. He had played the World Cup symptomatic, repeatedly coughing up blood. He underwent chemotherapy in Boston in 2012, returned to international cricket in September 2012, and went on to play in the 2014 World T20 final. He retired from international cricket in June 2019. His foundation, YouWeCan, has worked on cancer awareness and screening in India since.

In 2026, at 44, Yuvraj Singh is one of the most-recognised Indian cricketers of the post-Tendulkar generation, a 2011-World-Cup hero whose story is documented in his memoir The Test of My Life and in two decades of broadcast footage. The six-sixes over remains, by ICC's own count, one of only six such overs in international cricket. The 2011 Player-of-the-Tournament award is, separately, among the most-decorated single-tournament Indian-cricket performances on record. The cancer recovery is the third layer of a biography that the country has, in net, treated with unusual care.