Is Avinash Sable on track to bring it home? Rudraneil Sengupta on India at the Olympics
The steeplechase runner is the country's second big hope in track and field at the Games, after Neeraj Chopra. And what a run he has had.
India’s athletics federation, it has emerged, expects two medals from the 30-strong track and field contingent that will compete at the Paris Olympics.
One of those medal prospects is, of course, Neeraj Chopra, whose javelin throw won gold at Tokyo 2020. Who might the other be? The federation has named no names, but with due respect to the powerful squad, the second name is obvious too: Avinash Sable.
This is not to take anything away from others in this record-setting contingent. India has never had as many men and women qualify in athletics, and that is a big leap forward in itself. There are plenty of other firsts. Jyothi Yarraji is the first Indian to qualify for the women’s 100m hurdles. For the first time, India will have two competitors in a single athletics event at the Games (javelin throw, where Kishore Jena will compete alongside Chopra).
Annu Rani is the first Indian woman to qualify for javelin throw, and the brilliant Parul Chaudhary will be the first Indian to compete in two events in this programme, the women’s 5000m steeplechase and women’s 3000m steeplechase.
All 30 names on the squad are dominant in Asia, but 28 of these do fall a bit short of the Olympic medal standard.
Which brings us back to Sable. And what a prospect he is. This past week, he smashed his own national record in the 3000m steeplechase, for the 10th time in five years — at the Paris Diamond League, at the same track he will race on during the Olympics.
Sable only began running in 2015. The 29-year-old from drought-hit Marathwada almost quit school to work in a brick kiln, after his parents’ crop failed one too many times. He now holds the Asian Games record in his sport, and became the first non-Kenyan athlete since 1994 to win a Commonwealth Games medal in it, when he finished just 0.05 seconds behind Kenyan gold medallist Abraham Kibiwot at Birmingham 2022.
That year, Sable also began to compete in other categories. He smashed a 30-year-old national record in the men’s 5000m run in only his second attempt at the event.
Nine years in, he barely notices the records he sets and breaks.
“My ambitions have changed,” he told me. “I think now that breaking national records is not going to improve me as an athlete, so that’s not my target anymore. I don’t even think it’s enough to be the best at the Asian level, or win a gold at the Asian Games. I want to win Olympic medals and world medals. I want to keep improving.”
If there is one blip in Sable’s career, it is his inexplicable failure to make it out of the heats at the 2023 World Athletics Championships, in what was the slowest race ever run at the event.
“After that, I thought I should give up running, go back home, and do something else,” he said. “I could not accept it. But then I remembered the struggles in my life, how we could not even eat twice a day when I was a child… and I realised the importance of my journey.”
When he returned to the track, it was with a new appreciation for the strategic nuances of the steeplechase — a complex and tactical sport that requires all the pacing of distance running, but also throws in 28 obstacles and seven water jumps over 3 km.
It’s a sport so complex and unwieldy that the Olympic, World and World Championship records are all held by different people. Only one woman has won more than one Olympic medal in its history at the Games; only two men have won twice.
“I needed to plan better, and I needed to understand my pace better,” Sable says. “My failure (at the Worlds) was a great learning moment for me. Because now I know that I will not make the same mistakes in Paris.” Let’s call that hurdle one.
Here’s to Chopra, and Sable, and India at the Games.
(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com)
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