5 days ago
How Indian sprinter Rupal Chaudhary overcame injury to emerge a winner
In August 2022, Rupal Chaudhary won two medals at the World Athletics U-20 Championships. She took silver as part of the 4x400 mixed relay team where they smashed the Asian record. Then, in the women's 400 metres, she clocked a personal best of 51.85 seconds, the sixth fastest time among juniors that year. As the first Indian to win two medals at the U-20 World Championships, the teenager from Shahpur Jainpur near Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, had announced her arrival in style.
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Three months later, however, the quarter miler went missing from the competitive circuit. An injury during training left her with a tear in the anterior cruciate ligament as well as the meniscus. She spent most of 2023 in rehab, longing to get back to the track and continue where she had left off. Even as she was finding her form again, an illness resulted in missing out on the Paris Olympics. Those months taught Chaudhary a lot about patience.
This May, at the Asian Athletics Championships in Gumi, South Korea – her first major competition since the injury, Chaudhary wanted to simply run as fast as she could. She first took silver in the women's 400 metre, and followed it up with two gold medals in the mixed and women's 4x400m relay. 'I'm happy with my performance, but not satisfied. You'll see a different joy on my face when I'll be satisfied. But yes, I'm relieved to see that it's all coming together for me again," Chaudhary, 20, says.
Midway through 2023, Chaudhary remembers a testing period that left her disturbed. She had just about resumed training, but a heavy load in preparation for the Asian Games trials left her injured again. She disconnected from the world and kept to herself back home, uncertain of what the future had in store. It was only after her parents talked her out of it that she connected with coach James Hillier, who asked her to travel to Mumbai to get treated. An extended period of rehabilitation under Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala followed. She resumed training and six months later at her first race, clocked 52.79 seconds.
'That race made me realise that I could do really well because I had been away from the track for about a year-and-a-half and still managed that timing. Then, in the months ahead when I wasn't running very well, my timing went up to 53-54 seconds. But that's as bad as it got. During that time, I saw some highs as well as lows both of which were enough motivation to keep putting in the work," she says.
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Since December 2024, Chaudhary has been working with coach Jason Dawson at the national camp in Thiruvananthapuram. Her first race this year was the Indian Open 400m Competition in March, where she took gold (52.41s) ahead of more experienced runners like Vithya Ramraj and Sneha K.
'I was taking on full workout loads before that event and I just had a day's break before the race. The coach asked me to approach it like a training session," she says. A month later, she beat Vithya and Sneha again to take gold (52.55s) at the National Federation Senior Athletics Championships. She had trained for just two weeks while recovering from a minor back injury. 'The consistency of the timing was really satisfying. It gave me belief in my abilities and I realised that if my training is not hampered, I can get the results. And yes, winning against opponents who are older and more experienced is a lot of motivation to keep improving," she says.
The journey of discovering has been a constant since Chaudhury found the joy of running at school in 2017. At the physical education teacher's insistence, Chaudhary and her father, Omveer Singh, started travelling 23km – each way – to get to the Kailash Prakash Stadium in Meerut. Her father would spend hours watching her train, bring her back home, and then attend to the fields.
'Those days, my father didn't have timely meals nor enough rest. Our only income is farming and he couldn't focus on it either because of my training. So he refused to take me to the stadium after a few days," she recalls. Chaudhary was hurt and didn't eat for three days in protest. It was only after her mother, Mamta Devi, played peacemaker that her father agreed to let her train again. 'He gave me a year to win a medal at the Nationals and I was aware that it was the only way I could continue running," she says. A year after she took to regimented training, Chaudhary won gold in the 600 metre event at the Junior U-14 Nationals. There's been no stopping her ever since.
Shail Desai is a Mumbai-based freelance writer.
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