What does Gurindervir’s stunning 10.09 sec mean for Indian athletics?

When the social media was celebrating the feat of sprinter Gurindervir Singh last weekend, a stray comment on the Facebook wall caught my eye: ‘What is there to celebrate as it’s nowhere near world standard?’

A comment which betrays a lack of awareness about the ground realities about Indian athletics – with Gurindervir being the first Indian sprinter to clock a sub-10.10 sec in history.

It’s been two days since the Federation Cup athletics concluded at Birsa Munda Stadium in Ranchi, but the ripple effects of the turbaned runner’s feat alongwith Animesh Kujur – both elite athletes at the Reliance Athletics Foundation in Bhubaneshwar in Odisha – has become quite a talking point.

In a space of two days, the 100m national record had changed hands thrice among the duo as it raised the vision of either of them competing in the men’s final of Asian Games later this year in Nagoya.

Just ponder this: Gurvindervir, 25, from Jalandhar in Punjab lowered the national record with a timing of 10.17 sec in the heats but within minutes, Jharkhand’s Kujur blazed the track at 10.15 in a separate heat to break it.

The final on Saturday hence turned a highly anticipated affair but Gurindervir settled it with 10.09 sec, the first Indian to break the 10.10 sec barrier. Hence, three national records were created inside 24 hours – a rarity in a nation where a lot of aspiring Indian sprinters’ default choice is usually 400 metres.

Looking back, what does their achievement mean – apart from qualification for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in July? The reality check is: the world record stands at 9.58 secs in the name of peerless Usain Bolt while Asia’s best-ever in 100m is 9.83 sec, achieved by China’s Su Bingtian at Tokyo 2020.  

Gurindervir’s 10.09, in comparison, is not a final contender in the global stage alright but it’s a giant leap in a country where Adille Sumariwala’s 10.4 sec clocked in 1981 had stood as the best national time for decades.

Speaking after his landmark win on Saturday, Gurindervir – the man of the moment – revealed how he was advised by his childhood coaches to take up the quarter mile (400m) instead as ‘100m was not for Indians.’

If the perception about Indians being more suited for the 400m races came from a time-tested understanding that they did not have it in their DNA, it could have been also due to the fact that the Flying Sikh Milkha Singh missed out the bronze by a whisker in this event only in 1960 Rome Olympics.

There was, however, a significant breakthrough when in 2013, researchers from the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences in Delhi published the first systematic study of sprint-related genes 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 meaningful difference in the sprint gene’s distribution across these groups, and the overall Indian profile closely resembled that of Caucasian Europeans.

Is there hope then for the Indian sprinters to break the so called glass ceiling of a sub-10 mark? Time only can tell but then, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that the gap is narrowing and Gurindervir has now laid down an important marker.

The history of track & field is never short of examples where such barriers have been broken – the one that readily comes to mind being that of English runner Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute bar for 1500m.

When he ran 3:59.4 in 1954, the barrier had been deemed physiologically impossible since then. Within months, others had followed. The critical part about the co-existence of Gurindervir and Kujur is the common wisdom that athletes and swimmers do push each towards individual excellence. This could well see the ushering in of a sprint culture in the country - which had been missing.

 Let’s keep our fingers crossed!