Why Gurindervir Singh and Animesh Kujur are national treasures

Twenty-five-year-old Gurindervir Singh of Jalandhar, Punjab clocked 10.17 seconds in the 100m at the Birsa Munda Stadium in Ranchi on Friday evening. A new Indian National Record. Within minutes, Animesh Kujur, a young sprinter from Jharkhand, ran 10.15 in solo heat and broke it. The national record changed hands twice before dinner.

Saturday’s final had the quality of a duel. Gurindervir took 10.09 seconds to solve it – the first Indian in history to break the 10.10 second mark. Three national records. Two athletes. One stadium. Twenty four hours.

For anyone who follows athletics, that sequence of events requires a moment of silence. Not because an Indian broke a national record – that happens. But because of which record and what breaking it means in the global context of the sport’s most coveted, politically charged and most contested event.

There is a race that takes less time than it takes to read this sentence out loud. And India has not been part of it for more than a century. Until now maybe.

A TALE OF TWO AFRICAS — AND THERE IS NO INDIA

To understand why India’s absence from sprinting is so complete, you must first understand the most striking geographical pattern in all of athletics. It divides the entire continent into two halves.

For decades, East Africa—Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania—produced the greatest long-distance runners the world has ever seen. Their muscles are dense with slow-twitch fibers—built for endurance, for long, steady runs at altitude without burning out. For most of this period, the sprint was simply not an event for Kenya. The country’s athletic identity was built on the marathon, the 5,000, the 10,000—on suffering over the distance, not on explosiveness over ten seconds.

The image began to shift. Kenya’s Ferdinand Omanyala ran 9.77 seconds in Nairobi 2021 – an African continental record and one of the fastest times ever. He is an exception, and a notable one at that, but he has largely remained an exception. Kenya has still not produced a generation of elite sprinters and Omanyala himself has struggled to translate his raw speed into Olympic or World Championship medals deep in the Caribbean and American circuits.

West Africa—Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal—has historically produced something else. Not marathoners. She made sprinters. The muscle architecture in this part of the world leans toward fast-twitch fibers—explosive, anaerobic, built for short, sharp bursts. This is where the story of sprinting was written, decade after decade.

However, a more accurate way to understand modern sprint dominance is not through West Africa itself, but through what the transatlantic slave trade did to West African populations over the centuries. The largest concentration of West African descendants outside of Africa is in the Caribbean and the American South. Jamaica, Trinidad, Bahamas, African American community. These populations carry the same genetic heritage and then, superimposed, built athletic cultures that channeled explosive talent into athletics of extraordinary intensity.

The numbers confirm this with surprising accuracy. Roughly 40% of all athletes who broke the ten-second mark represented Caribbean nations. Around 20% were specifically Jamaican nationals – from a country that represents less than 0.03% of the global population. That’s almost a hundredfold enrichment of athletic talent than chance would predict. And when you expand the number to include athletes born to Caribbean parents but competing for other nations—Canadian Andre De Grasse, whose parents hail from Trinidad and the Bahamas; British Linford Christie, born in Jamaica – the Caribbean thread runs even deeper.

One seeming outlier in recent memory – Italy’s Marcell Jacobs, who won gold at Tokyo 2020 – bears closer scrutiny. Born in Texas to a black American father and an Italian mother, Jacobs was raised in Italy and shares the same pattern of ancestry. No Asian sprinter has ever reached the final of the Olympic 100 meters. Japan celebrated nationally when Yoshihide Kiryu broke ten seconds in 2017. China had several performances below 10.10. India has not entered this conversation at all until this month.

WHAT THE SCIENCE REALLY SAYS

Here, the story is more nuanced—and more hopeful—than the standard narrative suggests.

The genetic basis of sprint performance is complex, but researchers have identified several key markers. The most studied is the ACTN3 gene, which produces a protein found exclusively in fast-twitch muscle fibers. A sprint-friendly version of this gene is strongly represented in West African athletes. The non-sprint version essentially means that your fast fibers are less efficient at the explosive work that the 100m requires.

In 2013, scientists from the Defense Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences in Delhi published the first systematic study of genes related to sprinting in Indian populations. They tested 598 Indian Army soldiers across four distinct ethnic groups – Rajputs, South Indians, Gorkhas and Ladakhis – and measured their ACTN3 profiles. The finding was significant: there was no significant difference in the distribution of the sprint gene between these groups, and the overall Indian profile closely resembled that of Caucasian Europeans.

Sit with it for a moment. Not a West African. But European. The same genetic pool that produced Linford Christie, Marcell Jacobs and generations of competitive European sprinters.

The study also found, on the endurance side, that Gorkhas and Ladakhs—both groups of Himalayan and Mongolian descent—showed genetic markers more suited to endurance performance. In other words, India is not one athletic gene pool. The Ladakhi of the high passes and the Rajput of the plains and the South Indian of Tamil Nadu do not share the same basic lineage. A subcontinent is a continent unto itself, both genetically and geographically.

There is another argument that the sheer size of India’s population makes the issue of genetics almost secondary. Although only a small fraction of Indians carry gene combinations favorable to sprinting, the absolute number of such individuals – in a country of 1.4 billion – is almost certainly in the millions. Sprinting talent exists somewhere in India. The question has always been whether the system is able to find it.

THE LONG STORY OF INDIA’S SLOW

This system failure has deep roots.

Cricket has eaten the ecosystem. From sponsorship money to coaching attention to parental ambition, sports have absorbed resources that could otherwise build athletes across disciplines. For most of India’s post-independence history, a kid with explosive speed in rural Punjab or Jharkhand didn’t grow up with a clear path to a sprinting career. There was no visible pattern, no funded program, no real prospect of financial stability. The talent either went elsewhere or was never found.

Milkha Singh’s near miss for a bronze medal in the 400 meters at Rome 1960 became the country’s most famous athletics story, and remains so in part because it ended in defeat. India has a high tolerance for glorious failure. What she lacked in the sprint is the infrastructure for success.

Neeraj Chopra’s gold spearheaded something in Tokyo. It has proved that the Indian body, properly trained and systematically supported, can stand on the top step of the Olympic podium. But the javelin is a technical event—the angles, the rotational mechanics, the years of specialized training. You can build a spear thrower. Sprint, as the world has long assumed, simply is or isn’t. India has not been for a very long time.

What 10.09 Really Means

Let’s clarify what it is not. Gurindervir at 10:09 a.m. Not a World Finals contender. The top of the sprint pyramid runs at 9.7, 9.8 — the rarefied air of the Caribbean and American circuits. The gap is real and not trivial.

But that’s the wrong frame. The right frame is what 10.09 does at home, historically and psychologically.

Think of the English runner Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile. When he ran 3:59.4 in 1954, the barrier was deemed physiologically impossible. More followed within a few months. Bannister broke the assumption that the record was unbreakable. Once the mind recognized that it was possible, the body followed. Gurindervir didn’t just set the time. Set permissions.

No less important is the presence of Animesh Kujur. India don’t have one fast man. It has two, from different states, different environments, pushing each other in real time. Kujur’s 10.15 was a national record by itself for about forty-five minutes. Rivalry is the most powerful engine of sports improvement ever invented. Jamaica did not produce Usain Bolt in isolation; it created a sprinting culture, deep and competitive at all levels, that made someone like Bolt almost inevitable.

SPEED POLICY

There’s a reason why nations invest in sprint programs, even when Olympic medals are decades away. Running 100m is not just a race. It is a statement of what a country believes its people can do. When India produces a sub-10.10 sprinter, it disrupts a hierarchy that seemed permanent. It says something that no specialized technical discipline can: we are fast. At the most basic, universal level of human sports performance.

Jamaica, a nation of three million, understood this and built a national identity around it. China got it. Japan got it. India is only now getting into the conversation.

Gurindervir Singh and Animesh Kujur are yet to make India a sprinting nation. What they did is more fundamental: they proved, despite the weight of history and the assumptions of a world that never expected it, that the Indian body belongs on this track. This is the prerequisite for everything that follows – funding, pipelines, talent identification programs and ten-year-olds in Punjab and Jharkhand who will now grow up knowing that it is possible.

The ten seconds will keep decreasing. The real race has just begun.

– The end

Issued by:

Debodinna Chakraborty

Published on:

26 May 2026 06:00 IST

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