From mud pits to the track: The inspiring tale of Shahnawaz Khan jumping towards glory

A few hours before he would compete in the men’s long jump at the Indian Open, a World Athletics Bronze level competition, in Bhubaneswar on Sunday, Shahnawaz Khan admitted he was a bit nervous.

Amongst his competitors were National record holder Jeswin Aldrin (Personal Best: 8.42m), Asian and Commonwealth Games silver medallist Murali Sreeshankar (PB 8.41m) and Muhammad Anees Yahya (PB 8.15m).

“ Pehle thoda dara hua thha (At first I was a little worried) about how I’d be able to compete with all these senior athletes. Then I decided, ‘I’ll just focus on what I want to do,’” he tells Sportstar.

So Shahnawaz took the paper bib that would be pinned to his t-shirt and wrote down a prediction for what he would do in the competition.

‘8 + jump’, he wrote.

In his fourth jump of the competition, Shahnawaz would do just that, clearing a distance of 8.04m. That mark would take him to a surprise lead before Sreeshankar snatched the win with a jump of 8.13m in his last attempt of the competition.

ALSO READ: After new National Record, Tejaswin Shankar says 8000 in decathlon is not an impossible number

Although he’d fall just short of gold, Shahnawaz had already entered the record books. When he made his 8m jump, Shahnawaz became only the 12th Indian to cross the 8m barrier in the men’s long jump. And at just 17, he’s also the youngest from the country to reach that milestone. He currently has the fourth-best jump by a junior athlete in the world this year. 

A stark example of Shahnawaz’s mentality is that at the end of the competition, his regret wasn’t that he was beaten to the gold medal, but that he wasn’t able to improve on his 8.04m jump. “Once I cleared 8m, I was thinking I could go even further. But I had one foul, and then I was too tight for my last jump,” he says.

While he can’t wait to jump even further, it is impressive how far he has come already.

Humble beginnings

His father drove a taxi, but Shahnawaz, having grown up in the village of Madhaipur in the Pratapgarh district of Uttar Pradesh, had no shortage of sporting inspiration. While his uncle Shahrukh is the current National Games champion in the 3000m steeplechase event, it’s his uncle Mohammad Hadees, a former national-level javelin thrower, who is his inspiration.

“My  chacha (uncle) was an Army athlete in javelin throw. When I was a child and he was in the village, he would take me to run and exercise on the banks of the Sai (a tributary of the Gomti) that flows near our village.  Wahan running karta thha aur tairta thha (I’d run and even swim over there). I would always look forward to that,” he says.

WATCH – Late bloomer Sujeet Kalkal emerges as India’s next wrestling hope

As he grew older, Shahnawaz started taking part in the long jump. “I did practise with a bamboo javelin, and I also ran like my uncle (Shahrukh), but I ended up doing the long jump. I didn’t like running because I was very skinny as a child, and I was worried I would become even skinnier if I ran. I also couldn’t do javelin throw because there aren’t any real facilities in the area I am from, where we have sort of inter-village jumping competitions. We don’t have a track runway like at the stadiums, so we just run on a mud track and jump into a mud pit. These competitions used to have prize money, so there was that motivation as well,” he says.

While Shahnawaz says he was fine with just taking part in the odd prize money competition, his uncle had bigger hopes for him. His role in Shahnawaz’s life only grew after the young boy lost his father to cancer when he was just 10 years old in 2018. Two years later, Hadees called in a favour and got Shahnawaz admitted to the Sports Authority of India centre in Panvel, Mumbai.

Shahnawaz trained for three years there, winning a gold at the state championships, before his coach suggested he give trials to train at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala. While he did earn admission to Patiala, Shahnawaz didn’t last long following the decision of the coaches there to mould him into a decathlete.

Lucky break

This wasn’t a bad choice on paper. “I used to play a lot of different events. I had trained in the javelin throw for a little bit because of my uncle, and I have a personal best throw of 62m in that. I was also not bad in the shot put. But I never wanted to be a decathlete. It was too much work to train for so many events, and I never wanted to run the 1500m. It’s too long!” he says.

Shahnawaz fled the centre without much idea of what he would do next before eventually returning to his village. He might have remained there but for a chance reply by Keerti Tiwari, coach of the junior jumps program at the National Centre of Excellence in Bangalore.

“He knew I was a coach, and he would always leave a message on my Instagram stories. One day, he asked if he could train with me in Bangalore, and although I couldn’t give him a place in the hostel, I told him to come to Bangalore and at least join the training group,” she says.

After he travelled to Bangalore in 2024, Keerti says she realised soon enough that Shahnawaz had something special. “He had a personal best of only around 7.10m at that time, but he had the kind of physique that is perfect for the long jump.

Most Indians in the long jump are tall but lean. Shahnawaz was tall (he currently stands 187cm tall and has grown a couple of centimetres since the start of the year), but he was also muscular. He had that explosive power that’s rare to find in India. I promised him that he’d be competing at the international level within half a year,” she says.

That was exactly what happened. In March, he jumped a then-personal best of 7.41m at the Junior Federation Cup to earn a spot in the Indian team for the Asian Under-18 Championships in Dubai. Although Shahnawaz didn’t place on the podium at his first international event, he would become a part of the Khelo India Scheme (which provides scholarships to talented athletes) and get a chance to train at the Sports Authority of India in Thiruvananthapuram.

Now training under coach Bhupinder Singh, Shahnawaz has only gone from strength to strength. He’s already improved significantly this year—he jumped 7.70m to win gold at the National Games in Dehradun, then cleared 7.90m to win the U-18 nationals in Prayagraj before his 8.04m jump in Bhubaneswar.

His coaches are confident a bigger jump is around the corner. “If he stays injury-free, he will do big things. Shahnawaz is a very competitive guy and sets really big goals for himself. He wrote ‘8m +’ on his bib in Bhubaneswar (sic). Before that, he had written 7.90m on the back of his bib at the U-18 nationals in Prayagraj. He has great fighting instinct, and once he decides to do something, he’s very hard-working towards that goal,” says coach Keerti.

While he might have joined a very select group of Indian athletes, Shahnawaz doesn’t think too much of his achievement. “The strange thing is that after I jumped 8m, it was Sreeshankar  bhaiyya who came up to me and hugged me. I wasn’t even thinking about it. 8m is a big jump in India, but it is nothing special at the world level. If I want to win a medal at a competition like the World Championships, I need to jump something like 8.40 or 8.50m,” he says.

Come next year, Shahnawaz thinks he will be able to improve enough for that to be a possibility. There will be more immediate competitions over the next few weeks, and he’s already got plans on what he wants out of them. “I wrote down 8m plus on my bib in Bhubaneswar, and I crossed it. Next time I’ll write down 8.20 plus on my bib,” he says.