Accidental sprinter Abinaya Rajarajan eyes the big leagues after record-breaking junior run

A box of  kaju katli was waiting for Abinaya Rajarajan following her women’s U-18 100m race at the Junior National Championships in Bhubaneswar on Sunday. Her father Rajarajan was so confident about his daughter’s prospects that he had bought the sweet earlier in the day. As he had expected, the 18-year-old finished several meters ahead of the rest of the pack, crossing the finish line in 11.68 seconds.

While she did dig into her favourite sweet, the 18-year-old admitted she was disappointed she had not improved on her time of 11.62 in the heats of the same event on Saturday. Indeed while Abinaya had won gold (her third straight in the U-18 category at the junior nationals) she was hoping for one other landmark. Her time of 11.62 drew her level with the junior national record set by two-time Olympian, double Asian Games silver medallist and senior national record holder Dutee Chand 11 years ago. But while Dutee benefitted from running against faster runners (her mark was set in the 2013 Youth World Championships), Abinaya – running in a domestic meet had to set her own pace.

Indeed when competing in a stronger field, Abinaya has run even faster – she clocked a wind assisted 11.60 at the Indian Grand Prix earlier in the year.

Unexpected start

While she’s now considered one of India’s top sprinting prospects, Abinaya only got into the sport by accident. Growing up in the village of Kalluthu, in Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi district, Abinaya says she knew she was the quickest amongst her friends at school but never had any chance to train formally. “I actually started my journey in athletics because I wanted to skip a maths class. One day when I was in seventh class, the PT Teacher came and said there were zonals and asked if anyone wanted to try to take part. I saw that if I did go for it, I’d get to miss my maths period so I agreed to take part. I wasn’t really serious about running then so I asked which was the shortest race, which I learned was the 100 meters. I was running barefoot and wearing a skirt instead of shorts but I still managed to win,” she remembers.

That win earned her a chance to compete in a district competition. Once again she ran barefoot and once again – now running against girls who were formally training – she managed to win. “It was only during this race when I learned that I was supposed to run in these shoes called spikes. My father bought me a 600 rupees pair of Nivia spikes. With that I went to the state championships where I lost in the semifinals,” she says.

At that level, Abinaya says she was competing against serious runners. “I didn’t like the feeling of losing so I asked my father if I could actually train to be a runner. He immediately agreed with it. Although no one in his extended family had ever been an athlete, Rajarajan says he always hoped one of his children would become a sportsperson. “I think in her first ever race she was hand timed at around 14 seconds. I didn’t know what that meant but I could see that even without any training she was faster than everyone else. So I thought I should support her and let her see how far she wanted to go,” he says.

There were no facilities to train at their village so Abinaya was taken by her father every day to the town of Tenkasi. There she would train at the Falcons Athletic Academy under coach Rositto Sax, a former Commonwealth Youth Games silver medallist. “I knew right away that she had a lot of talent. She was obviously very quick even without training but she also had that mindset where she didn’t like losing. No matter what training program or target I would set, she always had that self belief that she could achieve it,” he says.

Family backing

Her family believed in her as well. After a few months of making the 50 kilometer round trip between her village and Tenkasi, Rajarajan decided to shift the family to the town itself. It made things harder for him – there was the additional burden of rent while he also had to travel further — some 110km away in Thiruvananthapuram where he ran a shop selling mining equipment. “It wasn’t something I thought too much about. I knew that it was going to be helpful to Abinaya so I made the decision,” says Rajarajan.

Within a year of formal training, it was clear that Abinaya was built for bigger things. In 2022 she won gold in the U-16 100m at the Tamil Nadu state championships with a time of 12.38. This improved to a time of 12.35 and another gold at the South Zone championships and then 12.26 at the U-16 nationals in Guwahati.

The next year she improved her best further, clocking 12.15 at the U-18 nationals in Udupi. Although she finished in second place there, her time, which she ran while battling a fever, earned her a place at the Asian Youth Championships at Tashkent. “Until then I was running but I didn’t really know what I could achieve with it. I thought  chumma I might run in Tamil Nadu or maybe some other parts of India. I didn’t think I would go and compete internationally. But I ran in Tashkent and I did my personal best there (She clocked 11.85 to win gold). That gave me the confidence that I could do even more,” she says.

Since that first international competition, Abinaya has competed at the Asian U-20 championships in Dubai and the World Juniors in Lima. While she wasn’t successful in either – she was disqualified in Dubai and struggled to breathe in the cold South American city – she cemented her status as the best junior athlete in her event in India. She’s also started competing at the senior level in the country where although she’s not won a medal, she’s routinely made finals and steadily been improving her timing.

There have been challenges of course. Abinaya’s father found it increasingly hard to afford to pay for her diet and coaching and travel expenses to competitions in India. As such Abinaya has had to leave her coaching in Tenkasi and shift to the SAI centre in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. While she says she misses her old centre, her race timings vouch for the fact that she is getting faster.

Room to improve

Still only 18, there’s plenty of room for improvement. She admits her coaches routinely question her diet choices. They want her to eat healthy while she acknowledges sheepishly the fact that she loves to eat. “I love eating spicy, oily food and sweets. My coaches always complain that I’ll get sick but I have no restrictions in my diet. The only time I try to eat a little healthy is before a competition. I’m trying to eat a little healthier now,” she says.

Her coaches are hopeful she makes better choices but they are confident she will improve further. Some have observed that perhaps Abinaya’s best efforts will come not in the 100m but in the 100m hurdles and the 200m. At 174 centimeters she’s fairly tall for a female sprinter. Her long limbs mean she will usually have a slower start compared to athletes who have shorter limbs but gives her a distinct advantage in the second half of a race and also in clearing hurdles. But, although she tried the hurdles while training in Tenkasi, she started picking up injuries and eventually gave it up.

For now though Abinaya wants to stick to the 100m. “I love competing and I really enjoy being the fastest runner in a group. It feels special. Even in training, I enjoy speed workouts more than anything else,” she says.

Abinaya says she enjoys everything about the sprints to the extent that she’s a bit of a nerd about the sport — knowing to the microsecond what her competitors in India and her role models internationally – Sha’carri Richardson in particular — have clocked.

She has lofty standards of her own – by next year she wants to start to medal at the senior level and compete at the Asian Indoor and Asian Championships. But there’s more. Having equalled one of the records of Dutee Chand – probably the greatest Indian sprinter – she is looking to go better. “I wish I had run faster (at the Junior nationals in Bhubaneswar) because now I have only equalled the Indian record. I can’t do it now because this was my last competition in the U-18 age level. I can’t break that record but I want to break Dutee’s other record. She has the senior national record of 11.17 and I want to go faster. I want to become the first Indian woman to break the 11 second barrier,” she says.