page_title: Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam
section_title: Early life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam / Early life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin at the Palaly Airport, Jaffna, Sri Lanka in April, 1961 after being garlanded by Sri Lankan Olympian Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam
context_page_description: Dr Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam represented Sri Lanka at the 1952 and 1956 Summer Olympic Games.
  Ethirveerasingam also participated in three Asian Games: 1954, 1958, and 1962.
  He won the Gold Medal at the 1958 Tokyo Asian Games, which was the first Gold Medal of any kind for Sri Lanka.
  At the 1962 Djakarta Asian Games he took home the Silver Medal. He was co-record holder at the 1954 Manila Asian Games after jumping the same height as the gold, silver, and bronze jumpers, but came fourth due to having more misses than the other athletes. Ethirveerasingam finished eleventh in the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games high jump.
context_section_description: He was a student at Jaffna Central College, where apart from his accomplishments in athletics was a cricketer, which is not well publicised because of his athletic achievements. Competed for UCLA in the high jump at the 1959 and 1960 conference championships.
  He taught at universities in Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria and Sri Lanka. He also worked for UNESCO for five years.
  In later years whilst lecturing in Sierra Leone he captained the University cricket team in the local cricket tournament and in 1973 was appointed vice captain of the national team that played against the neighbouring country of Gambia.
caption: Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin after being garlanded by Ethirveerasingam at Palaly Airport in Sri Lanka in 1961.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Photos 1.5", "Image DateTime": "2015:05:12 09:30:58", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "158", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "406", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "11136", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2015:05:12 09:30:58", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2015:05:12 09:30:58", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2736", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2710", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}