The 2025 athletics season will be remembered as a landmark year for Indian sprinting, defined by the emergence of Animesh Kujur as the country’s foremost male sprinter.
At just 22, Kujur moved beyond domestic promise to establish himself as a serious international competitor, delivering a season of unprecedented depth, volume and performance that signals a genuine shift in India’s sprinting ceiling .
Kujur’s rise in 2025 was neither sudden nor accidental. It was the outcome of a deliberately aggressive competitive strategy combined with structured high-performance support, primarily through the Odisha Reliance Foundation High Performance Centre ecosystem.
Across the season, Kujur competed in 16 meets, running over 40 races across the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay, a level of exposure rarely attempted by Indian sprinters. The objective was clear: accumulate World Athletics Ranking points, test himself against elite fields, and force an entry into global championships.
The headline achievements were historic. Kujur clocked 10.18 seconds in the 100m, the fastest time ever recorded by an Indian. Though achieved with a +2.3 m/s tailwind and therefore technically outside the legal limit for ratified national records, the performance marked the first time an Indian man breached the 10.20 barrier. More importantly, it demonstrated raw speed potential that India had not possessed in the men’s sprint events.
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In the 200m, Kujur’s progress was both cleaner and fully ratified. He broke the national record twice, first at the Federation Cup and then at the Asian Athletics Championships in Gumi, South Korea, where he clocked 20.32 seconds to win a bronze medal. That performance now stands as the official Indian national record and placed Kujur among the top continental sprinters.
Later in the European circuit, he ran an even faster 20.27 seconds in Geneva, a wind-assisted mark that again did not count officially, but strongly underlined that his true potential lies closer to the 20.20 barrier or lower than India has ever previously witnessed .
Kujur’s impact extended beyond individual events. As part of a relay quartet representing Reliance Foundation Youth Sports, alongside Gurindervir Singh, Manikanta Hoblidhar and Amlan Borgohain, he helped shatter the 15-year-old national record in the men’s 4x100m relay.
The new mark of 38.69 seconds, set at the Indian Open Relays in Chandigarh, was significant not only for the time itself, but also symbolically. It validated a new performance model where private high-performance centres can field teams and deliver results that rival, and even surpass, traditional state systems.
The ultimate goal of Kujur’s demanding season was realised when he qualified for the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, becoming the first Indian male sprinter to do so. Competing on the sport’s biggest stage was a watershed moment.
However, the championships also exposed the limits of a volume-heavy competitive strategy. Kujur clocked 20.77 seconds in his 200m heat, finishing well outside the qualification spots. The gap of nearly half a second from his season-best 20.32 told a clear story: fatigue, illness and the cumulative toll of a long European season had dulled his edge by the time it mattered most.
Kujur himself acknowledged as much, admitting that the relentless schedule, while necessary for ranking qualification, stretched his physical reserves. The season thus offered a valuable lesson not just for the athlete, but for Indian athletics as a whole about the fine balance between chasing exposure and protecting peak performance. The success was real, but so was the cost .
Yet even after competing at Diamond League meets and the World Championships, Kujur returned to the domestic and university circuit, anchoring KIIT University to a 4x100m meet record at the Khelo India University Games 2025. That decision reflected both humility and a grounding in institutional sport, reinforcing the importance of platforms like KIUG in sustaining elite pathways.
Central to Kujur’s transformation has been his work with coach Martin Owens, whose focus was not short-term speed but foundational athletic development. Addressing basic mobility, strength and start mechanics laid the groundwork for his dramatic time drops from 21.18 seconds in the 200m in 2022 to 20.32 in 2025.
The integrated training approach treats the 100m and 200m as complementary events, developing both explosive power and speed endurance, rather than specializing prematurely.
Looking ahead, the challenge for Kujur lies in refinement rather than reinvention. Bridging the gap between a 20.32 national record and the sub-20.10 times typically required for global semifinal contention will demand sharper peaking strategies, fewer but higher-quality competitions, and meticulous recovery management. Encouragingly, his unratified performances suggest that the physical capacity already exists.
Animesh Kujur’s 2025 season did more than rewrite record books it provided proof that with the right structures, Indian sprinting can operate on a global performance plane.
The next phase will determine whether this breakthrough becomes a sustained era.
