How the defiant 1970s still outruns India’s modern athletic machine

To look at two distinct eras in Indian athletics is to flip a coin where both sides refuse to match. On one face, you have the 1970s, a decade that romanticised the absolute limits of human endurance on nothing more than raw ambition, army rations, and handmade leather. On the other, the mid-2020s, a factory-line ecosystem that yields Olympic hardware but operates with the predictable warmth of instant coffee.

As the sports ministry and its relevant arteries go about their business ahead of another Asian Games cycle, the corridors of power are afloat on a familiar, state-sponsored cloud of positivity. The official narrative says Indian athletics is launching into a brave new future. But if you want to follow and understand where the spike marks are actually leading, you have to look at the historical fault lines.

This isn’t a battle between heroes and villains. It’s a clash of two different worlds: the romantic hero of the twentieth century, driven by unsupported defiance, versus the pragmatic machine of today. No one is suggesting there is anything sinister about the modern world; it’s just clinical. It treats sport as a science – or to paraphrase it further, as data. Yet, when you pit the taped-up, barefoot survivors of the past against the data-driven elite of today, a paradox emerges. Against the push of the Indian athletic machine, the clock is trying to keep pace, but the soul of Indian track and field remains stubbornly locked in the past.

THE AGE OF SCARCITY

In the decades immediately following 1947, Indian athletes operated within an ecosystem characterised by soul-crushing scarcity. These were the days when athletes emerged from conditions of severe economic marginalisation, carrying onto the track not just a burning ambition, but the physical baggage of their upbringings – chronic Vitamin D and B12 deficits that left them vulnerable to career-destroying injuries long before they ever reached their promised primes.

Indian athletics ran on fumes for decades post-independence. (Reuters Photo)

To evaluate which decade truly owns the soul of Indian athletics, one must look far beyond the well-publicised numbers of national records. A rigorous, fair assessment requires us to normalise these achievements against the available technology, infrastructure, coaching, and sports medicine of their respective times.

During the initial decades after Independence, the infrastructure for track and field in India was simple: if you had a stadium, a ground, or a maidan, you ran. Athletes trained on unforgiving cinder, clay, or uneven grass surfaces where you spent half your energy protecting your ankle from sinking into soft ground. The concept of high-performance coaching was a myth, and sports medicine was merely a phrase heard whispered by those fortunate enough to travel abroad. In those days, the magic word recovery was not a protocol where you ducked into cryo chambers, compression boots, or oxygen tents; it was simply a command from the coach to stop running for the day. Nutrition was entirely unscientific, basic, and utterly dependent on whatever whole foods could be scraped together – eggs, paneer, and local chicken.

Yet, out of this vacuum, pioneers emerged. Following the early Olympic appearances of female athletes like Nilima Ghose and Mary D’Souza Sequeira at the 1952 Helsinki Games, sprinter Lavinho “Lavy” Pinto became independent India’s first genuine global competitor.

Lavy Pinto in action for India in 1952 Helsinki Games. (Courtesy: Indian Athletics)

Pinto, a suave Tata Group employee who trained under the watchful, amateur guidance of coach Benson Proudfoot, shot to regional fame by dominating the short sprints at the inaugural 1951 Asian Games in New Delhi. Named captain of the national contingent for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Pinto fought his way into the semifinals of both the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints.

His fourth-place finish in the 100-meter semifinal, with a hand-timed mark of 10.7 seconds, remains a largely forgotten benchmark for Indian male sprinting on the global stage. In the 200-meter semifinal, his rhythm was completely destroyed when he was temporarily blinded by the flying mud and dust kicked up by the high-kicking, aggressive stride of Australian sprinter John Treloar. Yet, Pinto persevered to finish fifth in 21.7 seconds – a monumental achievement accomplished entirely without starting blocks or basic physical therapy.

By the late 1950s and moving into the 1960s, the Indian Armed Forces stepped into the structural void, acting as a pipeline by applying military discipline to young men who had spent their childhoods running barefoot through rural outposts. The legendary Milkha Singh, “The Flying Sikh,” discovered his extraordinary lung capacity during compulsory military cross-country drills. Under the unyielding guidance of Havildar Gurdev Singh, Milkha trained for five to six hours daily. His regimen was killing -sprinting up steep, rocky inclines, running on the heavy, shifting sands of the Yamuna River, and, as track legend would have it, pacing his strides against meter-gauge trains. Extreme physical exertion made Milkha vomit blood; nobody in India at that time understood the biological thresholds of lactic acid accumulation.

Mikha Singh’s 400m record stood for 40 years. (Courtesy: Indian Athletics)

At the 1960 Rome Olympics, this raw, extreme training culminated in a historic run in the 400-meter final. Milkha executed a brilliant race, leading the field until the 200-meter mark, before Otis Davis and Carl Kaufmann stormed past him in a frantic photo finish. Milkha finished fourth, his time electronically recorded as 45.73 seconds, establishing a legendary national record that stood like the face of a mountain challenging climber’s for nearly four decades.

“We didn’t know what a modern track felt like until we stood on it abroad,” said the late Olympian long-distance runner Hari Chand in an interview. “In Montreal, the surface felt like it was throwing you forward. We were used to Indian tracks that try to swallow your ankles and pull you back into the soil.”

A similar capacity to overcome severe physical limitations was demonstrated by Gurbachan Singh Randhawa at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Originally a brilliant decathlete who won gold at the 1962 Jakarta Asian Games, Randhawa was forced to abandon multi-event competition after sustaining chronic shoulder and elbow injuries from throwing the javelin. Lacking access to orthopaedic surgeons, physical therapists, or even basic rehabilitation, Randhawa simply pivoted, choosing to specialise in the 110-meter hurdles. He set a hand-timed national mark of 14.0 seconds at the National Institute of Sports (NIS) in Patiala under the guidance of Hungarian coach Jozef Kovacs.

Milkha Singh (far left) and Gurbachan Singh Randhawa (first from right) in 2010 Commonwealth Games. (Reuters Photo)

During the Tokyo Olympic final, heavy rain softened the water-logged cinder track as temperatures also dropped to 13 degrees Celsius. It was a sluggish start on the heavy surface, but Randhawa’s decathlon-bred endurance propelled him to a magnificent fifth-place finish with a personal best of 14.09 seconds.

THE DEFIANT 70s

If there is one decade that stood out for athletic defiance, it was the 1970s. Resource scarcity was normal when it came to Indian athletics. It wasn’t that a few athletes trained abroad and the rest in India; set against this backdrop, what a few Indian athletes achieved was not only remarkable, but it was also world-class. Two distance runners produced performances of such calibre that their national records resisted the onslaught of subsequent technological progress for more than forty years.

Sriram Singh Shekhawat enlisted in the Rajputana Rifles in 1966 to escape rural poverty, and by 1967, he began training under coach Mohammad Ilyas Babar. Babar, kurta-pyjama clad, was an eccentric, intensely dedicated but unconventional coach. His training regimens bordered on the extreme. Babar famously made Sriram run one hundred repeats of 100-meter sprints on the lawns of India Gate, pushing the runner to the brink of his endurance. Whatever was left, Babar made Sriram sprint repeatedly up the asphalt incline of Rajpath leading to Rashtrapati Bhavan to build lower-body power.

Sriram Singh Shekhawat set the Asian record in 800m in 1976, which stood till 1994. (Courtesy: Sports Ministry)

Sriram’s preparation for the 1976 Olympics had none of the inputs that athletes take for granted today. His running spikes were handmade by a cobbler named Kartar in the Karol Bagh neighbourhood of Delhi, who shaped the leather shoes entirely by hand for just Rs 75. When he arrived at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, it was the first time he had ever set foot on, let alone raced on, a synthetic polyurethane track. International exposure was zero. He travelled without a physiotherapist, a masseur, or a recovery specialist. On the track, Sriram shattered his personal best in the heats and fought his way through a competitive semifinal. Running on consecutive days, more than fatigue, sheer anxiety deprived him of sleep the night before the final.

In the 800-meter Olympic final, Sriram ran from the front, a bold, fearless strategy. Cuba’s powerhouse Alberto Juantorena was surprised to see an Indian lead the world’s elite for the first 500 meters of the race. But the energy-sapping rebound of the synthetic track wasn’t something he had prepared for, and Sriram finished seventh in the world with a spectacular Asian record of 1:45.77.

Juantorena, who won the gold medal in a world-record time of 1:43.50, later credited Sriram’s aggressive pacing for the record, famously saying that it was the Indian who had forced the field into a territory where world records became inevitable. All seven runners behind Juantorena broke their national records. Sriram’s time remained the Indian national record for forty-two years until Jinson Johnson finally lowered it in 2018.

Alberto Juantorena in 2017 IAAF World Relays. (Courtesy: Reuters)

Operating alongside Sriram was Naib Subedar Shivnath Singh of the Bihar Regimental Centre. Shivnath was an entirely self-made distance runner who logged thousands of miles running barefoot on the scorching asphalt roads across India, with his feet protected by nothing more than standard adhesive bandages wrapped around his toes. While Sriram Singh brought Indian middle-distance running onto the global stage, Shivnath competed in the men’s marathon, finishing eleventh overall with a time of 2:16:22, the finest Olympic marathon performance by an Indian runner in history.

Two years later, on April 12, 1978, at the National Championship in Jalandhar, Shivnath clocked a historic marathon time of 2:11:59. Although he wore shoes in Montreal, a majority of Shivnath’s training miles were logged barefoot on treacherous roads. His national record of 2:11:59 was so advanced that it stood for an astonishing forty-eight years. It was finally broken by a mere two seconds on April 12, 2026, when Sawan Barwal staggered across the finish line of the Rotterdam Marathon in 2:11:58. For those trying to understand present-day athletics, Shivnath achieved his feat with no modern support and under energy-sapping weather conditions. The Montreal Games also featured long-distance runner Hari Chand, who competed entirely barefoot in the men’s 10,000-meter run, demonstrating the sheer resilience of this generation. His timing of 28:42.72 in the heats stood for 32 years.\

Shivnath Singh is perhaps the greatest marathon runner India has ever produced. (Courtesy: X)

It wasn’t just about getting the stage to perform; it was also about surviving the lack of infrastructure. After winning gold at the 1974 Asian Games, long jumper T.C. Yohannan sustained a severe knee injury during training in 1978. Lacking specialised sports medicine, he underwent multiple rudimentary surgeries but was never able to jump competitively again. Recently, Murali Sreeshankar’s father and coach, S Murali, spoke about how his son successfully came back from an injury that could have cut short his career. It was a stark reminder of how the absence of sports science previously cut short the careers of some of India’s finest icons.

PT USHA AND THE LAST GREAT ROMANTIC

Then came the 1980s and independent India’s most celebrated female track athlete, PT Usha, now the President of the Indian Olympic Association. Discovered by coach O.M. Nambiar through Kerala’s model that scouted rural talent and provided basic athletic training within state-run facilities, Usha’s career was forged on the heavy, sandy beaches of Payyoli in Kozhikode. It was the resistance of the dry sand that built Usha’s explosive leg power and high stride volume. Her nutrition was completely basic, consisting of a standard diet that included fish and eggs but was bolstered by fresh fruits. Stories are still told of Nambiar preparing “egg-flips” – raw eggs whisked into hot milk.

PT Usha once ran 11 races in a span of 3 days. Is that even possible today? (Courtesy: Reuters)

There was no access to a professional physiotherapist, so between gruelling heats, recovery was simply getting into a bath. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Usha competed in the inaugural women’s 400-meter hurdles, missing the bronze medal in the final by a heartbreaking 0.01 seconds, finishing fourth with a time of 55.42 seconds. She also anchored the Indian women’s 4×400-meter relay team to a seventh-place finish in the Olympic final.

At the 1985 Asian Championships in Jakarta, she ran an astonishing eleven races over a three-day span, winning five gold medals. Today, it would be termed a miracle. In the modern social-media-driven world, her digital footprint would have turned her into an overnight, cricket-like celebrity. Yet, her recovery was always severely compromised by primitive testing procedures. Dehydration from consecutive races made it extremely difficult to provide urine samples, forcing her to wait up to two and a half hours in testing rooms after each final, severely restricting her sleep and recovery windows. Her hurdles mark of 55.42 seconds stood unbroken as the national record for thirty-nine years.

FROM DIRT TO HIGH PERFORMANCE

Then came the turn of the 21st century, trading the romance of the dirt track for corporate ledgers and sports science. Corporate sponsorship, specialised foreign training, and advanced sports science entered Indian athletics, forever altering the training map. Long jumper Anju Bobby George became India’s first-ever senior medallist at the World Athletics Championships, winning bronze at Paris 2003 with a jump of 6.70 meters. Under the guidance of her husband and coach, Bobby George, Anju transitioned from a state-supported athlete into a professional, independent sporting program.

Anju Bobby George’s long jump record, set in 2004, was finally broken in 2026. (Courtesy: Reuters)

At the 2004 Athens Olympics, Anju produced a brilliant performance to finish fifth in the long jump final, setting a national record of 6.83 meters that highlighted the impact of systematic, individualised preparation.

Eight years later, at the 2012 London Olympics, the growing strength of Indian field events was on display with both Krishna Poonia and Vikas Gowda qualifying for the finals of the women’s and men’s discus throw, respectively. Poonia finished sixth in the Olympic final with a throw of 63.62 meters, while Gowda, a US-based thrower with access to world-class coaching, finished eighth with a mark of 64.79 meters. Despite their historic double-finalist achievement, the media treated their performances with considerable harshness, broadcasting headlines such as “Poonia Disappoints,” illustrating the intense pressures even modern, well-supported athletes face.

Krishna Poonia was treated harshly by Indian media during London Olympics. (Courtesy: Reuters)

Four years later, at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Lalita Babar emerged as the sole saving grace of a disappointing campaign, qualifying for the final of the women’s 3000-meter steeplechase and finishing tenth with a time of 9:22.74, a breakthrough that came amid growing state funding through the newly launched Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS).

Lalita Babar was one of the first products of TOPS scheme. (Courtesy: Reuters)

THE PRAGMATIC MACHINE

This brings us squarely into the 2020s – the golden age of absolute achievement and the reign of our clinical, data-driven framework. Managed by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, Sports Authority of India, the Mission Olympic Cell, TOPS and the Athletic Federation of India, utilise a highly structured framework, bypassing bureaucratic delays through Direct Benefit Transfers to offer substantial monthly stipends. Nutritional budgets at National Centres of Excellence are scaled, and unannounced anti-doping testing is conducted rigorously by NADA.

The ultimate validation of this modern machine is, of course, Neeraj Chopra. Integrated into an elite pathway after his 2016 World U20 gold, Chopra was provided with top-tier foreign coaches, training blocks in Europe, custom javelins, and elite medical squads who treat his body like a piece of fine art. The result was historic: an independent India’s first-ever track and field Olympic gold medal at the Tokyo 2020 Games with a throw of 87.58 meters. He followed this with a silver medal at the Paris 2024 Olympics, a gold medal at the 2023 Budapest World Championships, and a personal best of 90.23 meters at the 2025 Doha Diamond League, establishing himself as India’s greatest-ever track and field athlete.

Neeraj Chopra changed how javelin is seen in India. (Courtesy: Reuters)

But outside of Chopra’s singular genius, this corporate pipeline has also brought its style of friction. The contemporary era has produced unprecedented depth, highlighted by the men’s 4×400-meter relay team breaking the sub-three-minute barrier to finish fifth at the 2023 Budapest World Championships, and high jumper Sarvesh Kushare placing sixth at the 2025 Tokyo World Athletics Championships with a personal best of 2.28 meters, later breaking the national record by jumping 2.31m.

Yet, after flirting with world-class timings, the relay squad imploded following the Paris Olympics, trading public insults with Jamaican coach Jason Dawson. Star quarter-milers rebelled against Dawson’s authority, domestic coaching egos clashed with management, and the Athletics Federation of India was forced to rebuild the relay team from scratch. The fallout cost them dearly, causing them to fail to secure direct qualification for the 2025 World Championships. When you build a machine, a single malfunctioning part or ego can stall the entire high-performance engine.

“You can’t come and try to trick the coach and the program,” said India’s 400m foreign coachJason Dawson after Vishal TK’s historic National Record run!!!

He added: “I currently don’t have the assistant coach and I do not want an assistant coach as I want people to work with pic.twitter.com/ZzCImAjLTD— nnis Sports (@nnis_sports) August 21, 2025

GREATNESS THEN, GREATNESS NOW

Strip Neeraj Chopra’s singular phenomenon from the ledger, and the modern era faces an uncomfortable truth. Millions of rupees, corporate funding, synthetic tracks, and world-class sports medicine have successfully bought us consistency at the Asian level. But they haven’t bought entry into the very rooms where the past once flirted with glory.

Since Anju Bobby George flew down the runway in Athens twenty-two years ago, or since PT Usha missed a podium by a heartbeat forty-two years ago, no Indian track or jump athlete has lined up in an individual Olympic final. Not in the 400 meters, the 800 meters, the hurdles, or the long jump. Shivnath Singh’s marathon mark stood for forty-eight years, mocking generations of runners who had access to sports science he couldn’t have dreamt of, until Sawan Barwal finally scraped past it by a mere two seconds in April 2026.

Sawan Barwal finally broke Shivnath Singh’s marathon national record in 2026. (Courtesy: PTI)

As a veteran coach once muttered over a chai (tea) at an inter-state meet: “Our athletes have world-class lactate data now. What they lack is the raw desperation.” Sriram Singh never had a sports psychologist. His shadow probably always reminded him of the prospect of returning to rural poverty.

Ultimately, the choice between the 1970s and the 2020s depends entirely on what you choose to value. If a golden age is judged strictly by global podiums, the 2020s wins the argument. Led by Chopra, Indian field athletics has proven that state support and targeted sports science can successfully translate raw potential into predictable global success. This is the era of the Pragmatic Machine. It is clinical, efficient, and undeniably successful.

However, when normalised for a complete lack of high-performance technology, sports science, and basic recovery, the 1970s remains the true, romantic hero of the narrative. The performances of Sriram Singh and Shivnath Singh establish benchmarks that withstood nearly half a century of subsequent technological progress. Compare that to the modern 100-meter national record, a mark rewritten six times in the span of just two years and seven months, tumbling from Manikanta Hoblidhar’s 10.23 seconds in October 2023 to Gurindervir Singh’s blistering 10.09 seconds in May 2026. Today’s records are written in sand, washed away by the next wave of super-spikes and track technology; the marks of the seventies were carved in stone.

A fair assessment of Indian track and field since independence reveals this thought-provoking historical duality: the 2020s represents the pinnacle of professional achievement, but the 1970s remains the greatest decade of unsupported athletic defiance.

– Ends

Published By:

Kingshuk Kusari

Published On:

Jul 27, 2026 12:06 IST