NEW DELHI: Jyothi Yarraji‘s indomitable spirit has helped her fly past any hurdle that life has thrown her way. The 23-year-old from Andhra Pradesh has surmounted several difficulties to attain the tag of India’s indisputable hurdles queen.
Her father, Suryanarayana, works as a private security guard while her mother, Kumari, doubles up as a domestic help and a part-time cleaner at a city hospital in Visakhapatnam.Their combined income of just Rs 20,000 per month wasn’t enough to sustain Jyothi’s athletics dream. But Jyothi didn’t let her family’s financial constraints stop her progress.
A couple of days ago, she created history when an official confirmation from World Athletics (WA) came her way about her qualification for the Paris Olympics – a moment she had waited for all along. The women’s 100m hurdles event has been a part of every Olympics since 1972, but this will be the first time that an Indian athlete will feature on the start list.
“Olympics is like a dream for every athlete. I just want to go there (in Paris) and express myself. I try to become a better athlete every day. I always take on challenges to move forward. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get there. Once you are an Olympian, it will always stay with your name. I want to do my best over there and not repeat mistakes,” Jyothi told TOI.
Jyothi secured the Paris athletics quota for India through her world ranking. The qualification window for athletics events for Paris 2024 had ended on June 30. However, the final Road to Paris standings were officially confirmed by World Athletics late last week. Jyothi occupied the 34th position in women’s 100m hurdles to make the cut-off among 40 athletes.
Jyothi could have breached the automatic entry standard for Paris on her own instead of waiting for her world ranking update, but a nasty fall at the Monet Grand Prix in Finland in May hampered her progress. She ran 12.78s in Finland and missed the mark by just one-hundredth of a second.
“I hit the 10th hurdle hard with my lead leg during the race and badly lost my balance and momentum. It took me at least 5-6 weeks to recover from that injury. I would have loved to achieve the qualification mark. While I was confident of qualifying through my world ranking, the injury did affect my preparations for Paris. I have three weeks left to train for the Olympics and I want to use this time judiciously. I will look to achieve my personal best in Paris,” said Jyothi, who is supported by Reliance Foundation and trains at its High Performance Centre in Bhubaneswar under coach James Hillier.
The reigning national record holder in the event, Jyothi is also the only Indian woman to win a medal in the women’s 100m hurdles at the Asian Games, where she won silver last year. She is the only Indian woman to go below the 13s-mark and holds the 15 fastest times ever run by an Indian in this category.
As a knock-on effect, three other women have now run faster than the longstanding national record of Anuradha Biswal that Jyothi broke. Jyothi’s personal best stands at 12.78s. She recently won gold at the senior inter-state athletics championships, continuing her unbeaten run in India.
“As Jyothi has qualified for Paris, our training regime would be slightly different from what we have been doing till now. She had a fairly serious injury 5-6 weeks ago and, because of that, she missed a lot of training sessions. Normally, when I train Jyothi for major championships, I will go for a lot of flat sprinting because she is a brilliant sprinter. For Paris, we will go less flatter in sprinting and focus a lot more on hurdling. We have to be very specific about what we do. Hopefully, Jyothi gets to a position where her muscle remembers what performances she had delivered earlier in her season and that comes back to her during the competition,” Jyothi’s coach Hiller said.
