Conquering hurdles and reaching for the stars Premium

Jyothi Yarraji has fought back from injury to cement her reputation as one of India’s brightest athletics prospects. Having rewritten the national record in the 100m hurdles four times this year, the 23-year-old wants to make a mark on the global stage

A little over a year ago, the standard 33-inch hurdle which Jyothi Yarraji had cleared innumerable times suddenly seemed like an impassable barrier. Just after New Year’s day in 2020, Jyothi had sailed over 10 of them at the All India Inter-University Athletics Championships in Moodbidri, Karnataka, to clock 13.03s, 0.35s better than Anuradha Biswal’s national record from 2002.

Though it was not ratified as the nation’s best because there was no one to dope-test competitors, the performance had thrust Jyothi into the limelight as one of the brightest athletics prospects. But eighteen months later, the sparkling promise had seemingly faded out. The pandemic and a combination of injuries — hamstring, groin and left knee (meniscus tear) — meant that a single hurdle started resembling an unscalable mountain.

“I couldn’t hurdle at all,” Jyothi recollects. “I was too scared. [Prior to that] I couldn’t even walk properly for six months. Then I started my comeback. The first two months were just horrible. Flat runs are easier, but hurdling is tough. I was scared every step.”

The 23-year-old’s transformation from such a state to the athlete she is now — national record holder in 100m hurdles, owner of the four best Indian times in the discipline and the only one from the country to run an official sub-13-second race — has been staggering. This season, she has rewritten the national record four times, including thrice during an astonishing fortnight in May in Europe where she first lowered it to 13.23s (Cyprus), then to 13.11s (Loughborough, England) and then to 13.04s (The Netherlands).

On either side of this stretch of results, she had two performances which were better than the then national best, but were deemed wind-assisted (more than the permissible 2 m/s) and hence not considered. This included her stunning 12.79s at the National Games in Gujarat in early October. There was also the Inter-State Championship in Chennai in June where she tripped on a hurdle and finished last.

But it wasn’t long before she proved her mettle again, this time in Bengaluru on a cold and rainy evening at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium, by going under 13s to clock 12.82s. After having settled for the realities of competitive sport earlier and submitted to its many idiosyncrasies, that victory in the last race of the year was a taste of salvation.

“I did three races back to back, at 7.30 p.m., 8.20 p.m. and 9.20 p.m., and that’s difficult,” Jyothi says. “But my good endurance workouts helped me be consistent across the heats and the final. The conditions were difficult too — windy, rainy and slippery. So there were some questions in my mind. But I just wanted to finish my season faster and on a high, and everything ended well.”