The 10-second project: Inside Indian athletics' most ambitious programme

Indian Express

24-05-2025

SPEED,' Manikanta Hoblidhar beams, 'has been my constant ally. Only ally.' And so, he sprints. Towards a goal — to see his bank balance soar to at least Rs 40 lakh to build a house he can call home.
He runs. Because very early in life, Hoblidhar — abandoned by his father and raised by a single mother who passed away in 2020 — realised that running, and not running away, could solve his many problems.
'If I run, run fast… if I achieve something big, I can make a good name for myself and my family,' says Hoblidhar, India's second-fastest sprinter.
He is also a goofy 23-year-old from Udupi, unshackling himself from a turbulent childhood — 'the world isn't interested in your problems, so why be sad,' he says.
'He's always smiling… always making others smile,' says Amlan Borgohain.
Borgohain knows a thing or two about masking pain. As a child, the sprinter from Jorhat, Assam, was bullied for a stutter. 'Jaldi bol,' his classmates and teachers mocked him. One of India's fastest men, the 27-year-old can now turn around and tell them, 'Jaldi chal!'
Borgohain's body is covered in ink. A lightning bolt on the side of his neck, 'maa' inscribed on his left forearm and a slogan in Sanskrit on the ribs. He oozes coolness, a feature common to most sprinters. And exhibits unwavering clarity. 'Everything happens for a reason,' he says of the bullying episodes. 'I choose to remember only the good things.'
In 2022, Borgohain set the 100m national record with a timing of 10.25 seconds. As he scorched the track, Gurindervir Singh watched in admiration from his sports hostel in Amritsar.
Today, 'Guri' is a muscular 24-year-old who runs like a breeze. Back then, he was all skin and bones, bogged down by an infection so severe that he lost '8-9 kg in 20 days', which he puts down to years of drinking 'contaminated water' and 'raw rotis' served in 'unhygienic conditions'.
'Wahi, dedh sau rupay ki diet (The same Rs-150 diet),' he says. It's a reference — a gripe — commonly heard in dining halls across sports hostels in the country that serve low-quality meals.
'My intestines were completely damaged. I couldn't even digest khichdi or curd. There were days when I couldn't even retain water,' Singh says. 'I couldn't even walk properly!' The thought of sprinting didn't even occur.
Far away, in Chhattisgarh's Bilaspur, Animesh Kujur's story started with a plea.
On October 20, 2022, the sprinter — tired of running into walls — took the desperate step of messaging James Hillier, the Brit who oversees the athletics programme at Reliance Foundation, where some of India's best athletes train.
'Sir,' Kujur began, 'I am an athlete from Chhattisgarh and last year only I started my athletics career in 100m and 200m…' He shared his CV, listing every result, and begged for an audition.
It broke his heart that the message was left unread.
The paths of these four, fast men from India's North, East and South have converged in the West, where they now live and train at an institute in Navi Mumbai.
They also find themselves at the starting line of a rare, exciting chapter in Indian sport called 'Project Sub-10' — running the 100m sprint in under 10 seconds, considered the hallmark of a world-class sprinter.
Until three years ago, it was a fanciful thought. But after three major sprint records were shattered in the last three months — Gurindervir set a new national 100m mark in March, Kujur broke the 200m record in April and this month, the four of them got together to rewrite the 4x100m relay record — the buzz is unmistakable.
Gift and grind make an elite athlete. In the case of India's fastest quartet, there's an element of defiance too.
'When I came to India (in 2019),' says Hillier, Director of Athletics at Reliance Foundation, 'People would tell me, 'No girl can run under 13 seconds for 100m hurdles'. They'd say, 'No one can run 10.20 for the 100m (men's), no one can run under 10 for the 100…' I said, 'Why not?'
'Invisible ceilings are being created all over the place. People are being told, 'You can't do that'. And everyone just blindly believes it. No one could ever give me a rational reason why. They might say, 'Oh, you know, we're genetically inferior or we're genetically this or that'. That's complete nonsense.'
Hillier has a history of walking the talk.
He was told India's women stood no chance of winning at hurdles. He proceeded to make Jyothi Yarraji one of Asia's finest. The Andhra sprinter won a silver medal at the 2022 Asian Games, a first by an Indian woman — and who knows, if not for a series of organisational blunders, it could well have been a gold.
As the 2026 Asiad fast approaches, Hillier now has his sights set on ensuring an Indian presence in the blue riband events — the 100m and 200m sprints, and the 4x100m relays.
Every single minute of the sprinters' day is designed keeping this big picture in mind.
On a muggy evening, the country's four fastest runners — who train together at the sprawling Navi Mumbai institute — are standing in a queue, an arm's length from each other and spot running. Every alternate second, a booming voice goes, 'Up!'. Instantaneously, the runner in the front puts his one arm backwards and the man behind him brings the opposite arm forward. The baton exchange is done in a smooth, singular motion.
This plays in a loop for a while before they move to the track. Training cones are placed at a distance of 30m and 60m from the starting line and one by one, they sprint through the timing gates and pass the baton. Here, they confront the ultimate relay dilemma: run too fast, and there's a danger of dropping the baton; focus too much on the baton and the speed suffers.
Individually, the sprinters are in shape to run 100m in 10.1 seconds, Hillier attests. In an Indian context, that will be another giant leap. But at an Asian or a world level, it still won't be good enough.
Bring their powers together, however, and you get a relay team fast enough to challenge for an Asian medal, which India hasn't won in 46 years.
This kind of attention to detail, access to equipment and investment has never happened before in sprints, Borgohain, the senior-most of the four sprinters, says.
'I feel money is the biggest reason because individually, we all come from humble backgrounds. We now have better quality of coaching, improved facilities, get the necessary supplements, there are exposure trips abroad… all this didn't happen earlier,' Borgohain says.
For Kujur, it's the change in mindset that coaches like Hillier and his colleague at Reliance Foundation, Martin Owens, have ushered in.
'The mindset of Indian coaches is like, 'Keep running, keep running, keep running'. The more the reps, the more the endurance will increase,' he says. 'The foreign coaches will break everything down… the last 30m, the top end, the middle portion. According to that, they schedule the workouts.'
Kujur sees the improvement. When Hillier and Owens took him under their wings, he was running in the range of 10.8 seconds. Last month, he ran a national record 10.2 seconds.
The gears have been turning over the last two years.
Individually, never before in India's sprint history have runners pushed one another to such limits, constantly raising the bar. Records that stood the test of time are now under threat every time one of them steps on the track.
In October 2023, Hoblidhar shattered the seven-year-old 100m national record by clocking 10.23 seconds. But this year, at the Indian Grand Prix in March, Singh ran a breezy 10.20 seconds to improve the record. By Indian standards, it was a fast race, with Hoblidhar improving his personal best by 0.01 seconds.
Two sprinters pushing 10.20 seconds in one race? That's unheard of on India's tracks.
More history was waiting to be rewritten. Borgohain held the 200m national record since 2022, with a 20.52-second sprint. On April 25, at the Federation Cup in Kochi, Kujur obliterated that mark.
In conditions that were far from suitable for quick running — it was so humid that athletes complained of their energy being sapped merely by standing on the track — Kujur completed the 200m in 20.40 seconds.
From the sultry shores of Kochi, the quartet landed in the dry heat of Chandigarh five days after Kujur set the 200m national record. 'We were all dead tired,' Borgohain says.
They teamed up for the first time for a relay race, representing Reliance Foundation at a Relay Carnival. 'We got together just an hour before the race. There was no time to strategise, so we just told each other, 'Don't drop the baton!',' Hoblidhar laughs.
When they stepped on the track in the heats, there was no sign of fatigue. Singh, Kujur, Hoblidhar and Borgohain clocked 38.93 seconds, only 0.04 seconds behind the 15-year-old national record set by Rahamatulla Molla, Suresh Sathya, Shameer Mon and Abdul Najeeb Qureshi at the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
Lured by the glamour of the relay, the few hundred who stayed back for the final were treated to some of the finest sprinting ever seen on Indian soil.
Starting in lane 3, Singh jumped quickly off the blocks and engaged in a smooth baton exchange with Kujur. Excellent on the bend, Kujur started building a lead and ensured a slick transition with Hoblidhar, who in just a few casual strides, pulled away from the pack. By the time he passed the baton to Borgohain, the rest of the field wasn't even in the same frame. Borgohain, the anchor, stole a glance at the clock as he touched the tape and broke into impromptu celebrations.
The timer next to the track flashed 38.69 seconds — the 4x100m national record was theirs. 'I knew it was a national record,' Borgohain says. 'If this was an individual event, I don't think we would have run so well. Here, we had a responsibility. We didn't want to be the person who let the team down.'
Days later, they ran together again in Dubai, setting a meet record by clocking 38.76 seconds. For 15 years, no Indian relay team had run 4x100m in less than 38.89 seconds. In 10 days, this quartet did it twice.
It's given rise to hope that on May 31, when the fast four will don the India jersey in Gumi, South Korea, they will do what hasn't been done in 46 years — win a 4x100m medal at the Asian Championship.
India's last medal in this event at the continental event, a bronze, came way back in 1979. The best performance in the last 10 editions of the Asian Championship has been fourth place — in 2003, when the team clocked 39.69 seconds and in 2007 (39.84 seconds).
At the last Asian Championship, in 2023, China won the silver medal with a timing of 38.87 seconds. Smooth, flawless baton exchanges, and the possibilities can make one go giddy.
And within the bigger team ambitions are personal goals. Like Hoblidhar's dream to build a home. 'That's also why,' he says, 'a medal at the Asian Games, Asian Championships is crucial. I'll do what I know the best — run.'