Spare a thought for Murali Sreeshankar, India’s long jump national record holder and the best male jumper from the country in a long time. On August 2, when the track and field part of the 2022 Commonwealth Games kicks off, he will be jumping to qualify for the finals.
The stars don’t seem to align for him at big events. In his sport, things need to align perfectly. A long jump is over in a split second, a moment in which everything in the body and mind needs to come together.
The athlete has to be in a state of mind to believe that he or she will jump well, that’s the first rule of jumps. That one clear thought paves the way for the body to follow what the mind is telling it to do. Some people call this “commitment to the jump”. The smallest hesitation results in the mind executing reflexive self-preservation commands, forcing the body not to gather as much speed as possible in the run-up and not be as explosive as possible in the jump phase.
Once the mind is willing, the body comes into play. That means hitting a 100m sprint-worthy pace in the run-up, but with enough control to harness that speed in the take-off, timing the take-off to a microsecond accuracy, coordinating every muscle in the body to fire in sequence and explode at the last point of ground contact, then controlling the body through the flight, kicking out as far as possible for the landing. Athletes don’t think about all this consciously of course when they jump, at which point the training simply kicks in, just like a batsman playing a shot is not consciously thinking about what to do once the ball is released.
The point being, a lot of tiny things can go wrong for the long jumper, and that makes all the difference between a great performance and an average one.
Back in 2018, the then 19-year-old Sreeshankar had cleared a 7.99m jump (8m and above puts you in the top bracket in the world) at a domestic meet, sending ripples of excitement about the possibility of a great long jumper from a country that does not do jumps very well. He was named in the 2018 CWG squad, his first major international meet. Ten days before the event, suffering from intense pain in the stomach, he was diagnosed with appendicitis, underwent an emergency surgery, and pulled out of the CWG. A few months later, he made his big-stage debut at the Asian Games in Jakarta; he struggled to find his rhythm in the run-up, and finished 7th.
Still, it was early days. He returned to India and soon set the national record, as he was expected to do, breaching the 8m mark with a 8.20m jump, the best among U20 athletes globally. It also made him the first Indian athlete to qualify for the Athletics World Championships, scheduled for 2019. Once there, he failed to make the finals, his best at qualifying way below 8m. This pattern was repeated. In March 2021, he reset his national record at a domestic meet with a 8.26m jump, qualified for the Olympics, went to Tokyo, jumped only 7.62m in the prelims and did not make the final.
Ahead of Tokyo, India’s athletics federation had dropped his name from the squad and then asked him to come down for a random fitness test just days before the Olympics and made him sign an undertaking that he would clear 8m at Tokyo - not the ideal way to inspire anyone to do anything.
This year, Sreeshankar finally made his breakthrough. He opened the season with yet another national record. He headed to Eugene, Oregon, for the Athletics World Championship on the back of that jump, but this time, things clicked. He cleared 8m in the qualifying rounds to become the first Indian male jumper to make the finals. He underperformed in the finals, but at least he had taken an important step forward.
Long jumpers in India are notching up their best-ever performances—this season started with not just Sreeshankar, but two of his compatriots, Muhammad Anees Yahiya and Jeswin Aldrin, breaching the 8m mark by quite a margin at the same competition, an unprecedented phenomenon in Indian athletics, which saw all three heading for the worlds as well as the CWG. Yet there’s no jumper among the commonwealth participants with Sreeshankar’s numbers. On August 2, the qualifying round promises to be a breeze for the Kerala man. It’s what he will do in the final on August 5 that may shape his future.
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