a day ago
Making of India's sprint sensation Animesh Kujur: Stories of Jesse Owens, controlled diet and faster competitors
Swag has always been Animesh Kujur's second skin.
At the Army School in Ambikapur in Chhattisgarh, the rookie footballer used to put up a show for his friends, impressing them by kicking the ball as high as he could. 'It would go up to one floor high, sometimes two… then everyone was happy,' he smiles.
His audience has now expanded beyond the tiny city to far corners of the country. But he continues entertaining — the sprinter, who was once fascinated by heights, now enthrals with his speed.
The 22-year-old has broken the 200m national record twice in two months. To put it in context, the 200m NR was broken two times in seven years before Kujur decided to take matters into his own hands—rather, his feet.
Kujur first rewrote the national mark in April, completing the 200m in 20.40 seconds. He thus erased the earlier record of 20.52 seconds held by Amlan Borgohain in 2022, who bettered Mohammed Anas Yahiya's 2018 time of 20.63 seconds. Then, last week in his first international tournament, Kujur improved his own timing by running 20.32 seconds to become only the second-ever Indian to win a 200m medal at the Asian Championships in close to half a century.
And he might just be warming up, his coach Martin Owens suggests. 'This is the bottom of the slope,' Owens, the chief coach at the Reliance Odisha High Performance Centre in Bhubaneswar, tells The Indian Express. 'He's going to get faster.'
When Owens took Kujur under his wings in November 2022, the sprinter was crawling, relatively speaking. The Englishman told a teenage Kujur, curious and sensitive, endless tales of American Jesse Owens and the legendary coach Budd Winter, who trained — among others — Lee Evans, Tommie Smith and Ronnie Ray Smith.
'I'm a big, big, big fan of the tradition of where athletics comes from. You've got to know your event and go all the way back,' Owens says. 'You've got to see what Jesse Owens was doing. How did he run? He set six world records in 45 minutes. That's quite outstanding. You've got to learn something from him. We talk about the starts and the toe drag. That goes back to a coach called Bud Winter.'
ALSO READ: The 10-second project: Inside Indian athletics' most ambitious programme
For Kujur, who'd grown up in a vastly different world, this knowledge was gold dust. In his early years, he wouldn't even understand event combinations in track and field — he'd once chosen 100m and shot put, two very different events, before switching to 100m and 200m.
He'd look up the theories professed by Winter and study Jesse Owens's starts. Of course, his starting point in the 200m was still way off and a lot more rudimentary.
Skipping workouts to acing them
'When I first came here,' Kujur talks of the facility in Bhubaneswar, 'I said, 'Wow, this is such a good facility'. Then, I met the coach and he welcomed me. After that, I got my workout schedule.'
For endurance, one of the drills Kujur had to do was the 300m runs, which had to be repeated 'three-four times'. 'I was very scared of that workout, it was too much to run three-fourths of the track,' he says.
A mischievous grin appears on his face as he reveals how he worked his way around those grinding sessions. 'The sessions used to start at 4 pm. So, I used to reach the track before everyone else, did one or two repetitions so no one could see and tell everyone that my complete workout was done,' Kujur laughs. 'I used to get scolded for doing this and coaches told me to train with everyone else. But I didn't want to show them that I was dying! So, I used to lie.'
Today, he can afford to look back at his early years and laugh about it. Owens certifies that Kujur 'does everything diligently' now. 'He's also now learning to eat more sensibly!'
'Eating sensibly'
At first, Kujur didn't quite understand the fuss about what went into his body. He'd feast on rice and curries and eat till he was full. 'A normal person eats rice, dal, sabji. Earlier, I didn't know (an athlete's diet), so I used to eat a lot of rice,' Kujur says. 'A lot,' he stresses.
Once he joined Owens's programme, his diet was 'controlled'. A team of nutritionists at the Reliance Foundation prepared a meal plan, which was also shared with the dining staff.
After just a few days of the new routine, an agitated Kujur walked up to the nutritionist. 'I told them I didn't feel full after eating, and complained that the dining staff didn't give me sufficient food. She (the nutritionist) was like, it doesn't work like that. 'You have to eat every portion according to the nutrients,' she told me.'
Kujur turned around and muttered, 'Kya yaar, aisa thodi na hota hai!' 'When I went to Europe last year, I understood that there is no such thing as rice. I realised there should be a lot of protein, fibre and carbs. That trip to Europe was life-changing.'
'Europe tour, life-changing'
The European tour last June was 'life-changing' for reasons beyond his diet. There, Kujur got exposed to faster runners who forced him to run faster and get better on the bend.
Kujur explains how that stint improved him, giving the example of a 100m sprint in Finland. 'I went there with a timing of 10.5 seconds. And in the second competition, in Finland, I got a Jamaican sprinter, Oshane Bailey, whose personal best was 10.05 or something in that range. To stay competitive with him in that race, I had to run fast and I ended up clocking 10.39 seconds. That's the difference…'
He adds: 'For the last 1-1-½ years, I had the 200m national record within my reach,' says Kujur, who had clocked 20.65 seconds twice and 20.57 seconds (unofficial) last year. 'But when I used to reach the bend, there was no competition in front of me.'
At the Asian Championships in Gumi last week, Kujur was ahead coming off the bend. 'Then he turned around and suddenly there were four guys that were up with him. And he's not used to that. So that's part of why he needs to go to these championships and why he needs to go to these (exposure tours),' Owens says. 'Yet, he did really well. He didn't panic, just ran his own race, medalled and set a new national record. Fantastic.'
More trips to Europe — where the athletes are 'not in awe of him' and he will 'race against faster people' — are in the pipeline after the Taiwan Open on June 7 and 8.
'If you can easily beat the people you're running with, you never push yourself hard,' Owens says. 'He's going to get faster because he'll race faster people.'
