Olympics 2024: Jyothi Yarraji becomes 1st Indian to compete in 100m hurdle

When Jyothi Yarraji leaps past each hurdle in her bid to reach the finish line, it feels like she is trying to put behind all the struggles that her mother Kumari underwent while working in double shifts as a domestic help and a cleaner at a local hospital in Visakhapatnam.

It is her gutsy mother's positive mindset while struggling for sustenance that Yarraji would like to carry when she gets on the starting blocks of her 100m hurdles heats during the Paris Olympics.

Yarraji will become the first Indian to compete in the Olympics 100m hurdle as she made it to the Paris Games through the world ranking quota.

 

"In the past, I did too much thinking, too much worried because of my family, my personal life and my background but I learnt a lot," Yarraji said in a virtual media interaction facilitated by Reliance Foundation.

"My situation is really bad sometimes. My mom always told me to just keep going forward because we can't stop the present, past and the future.

"She told me 'You work for yourself, whatever the result it will come... we will take it'. My mom will never tell me before a competition to win a medal, to win a gold. She will tell me to go and be healthy and be satisfied with whatever I am doing. That is why I always go forward with a positive mindset."

She also said that having people with positive mindest had also helped her as she tries to "improve my present, without thinking too much of the past and future".

"In the past, there was no great team around me. Now I have lots of positive people, a great team. That is helping me a lot. I always take the positivity with me. I try to change the negative thoughts into positive ones," she said, referring to her support system led by her coach James Hillier, who is also the Athletics Director at Reliance Foundation.

"I got a lot of injuries, lots of hurdle hits, lots of falling down. I got minus but I try to turn it to plus. I strongly believe that if I miss (fail to do well) in this Olympics, after next four years I don't know what I will be up to. I just want to use the present opportunity and to be the best version of myself. That's it."

Yarraji, who holds the national record of 12.78 second, admitted that there will be pressure during her debut Olympics but she is trying to remain calm and focussed by doing meditation.

"I don't have experience of (competing in the) Olympics but I am confident that it will go well. I have experience of Asian Championships, Asian Games and World Championships and I hope to take my plus points from there (Asian Games, Asian and World Championships) to the Olympics.

"It will be a tough and intense competition in Paris. There will be pressure but I will try to concentrate on my race so that I can reproduce what I had done in training. I am now focussing more on recovery and meditation so that I remain calm and focussed," said the Reliance Foundation athlete.

Asked if she has any target regarding her timing in Paris, she said, "I want to improve step by step. It is not about my timing. If we focus fully on timing, we can be locked at one place and we can't move forward. It is all about the process; how we are doing and how we are improving everyday.

"If I do anything wrong, I will cry and remove my pain and start again. That is it."

Got scared after getting injured in Finland

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Yarraji admitted that she got a bit scared when she suffered a hip flexor injury while competing in Finland in May.

"It was not good for an injury to happen with Olympics approaching. I worked on my meditation, breathing and worked on my concentration. It was step by step (to come out of the injury).

"But I made a good comeback in the National Inter-State Championships in June. The injury, in fact, was a good experience for me in my life; whatever the hurdles I have to cross."

Talking further about the injury, she said, "I was doing competition continuously. When we are in India, we have proper food on time, we have our masseur and staff, we have everything. But once we are out of country, we suffer a lot, we have to manage everything, food, travelling, etc.

"All these things affect us but still we have to manage and perform. Nobody knows what we are facing and people only want to see the results. We have to consistently perform and for that we always pushed our limits. In the process, I suffered the injury."

Yarraji in best shape ever: Hillier

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"She is in the best shape I have ever seen, physically and mentally. She can run significantly faster than her best timing. She has done that during training. She wants to run below 12.70 seconds," said Hillier, adding that the injury she suffered in May was "weirdly a good thing".

"We are fundamentally working on three main things -- speed, working on breaking her rhythm and building her rhythm back as fast as possible, and make her run so fast that she feels out of control of her body, the body being open to just being out of control.