‘When you can push yourself, why mustn’t you?’

India’s decathlete Tejaswin Shankar during the 110m hurdles at Glasgow on Friday. Pic/AFP

Four days ago, Tejaswin Shankar cut a lonely figure crouching on his haunches as he tried to suppress tears. A familiar knee injury had resurfaced after just one attempt in the high jump competition, forcing him to withdraw and turning his Commonwealth Games into a nightmare before they had barely begun.

On Friday evening, he stood in the same stadium with a decathlon bronze medal hanging from his neck, grinning through emotions that had swung from despair to disbelief in less than a week. "Guys, I won't cry today," he quipped as he walked into the mixed zone after becoming the first Indian to win a Commonwealth Games medal in the decathlon.

"If I was alone, I would have probably given up," Tejaswin told PTI. "Today, I am standing with a medal around my neck. I have no words. It's just unreal," he said. Tejaswin had won bronze in the high jump at Birmingham in 2022, becoming the first Indian medallist in the event at the Commonwealth Games. And why did he choose to compete in the decathlon alongside high jump? "Yeh dil mange more..I just want more. High jump is good, but when you can do more, why shouldn't you? I believe when you can push yourself, why mustn't you?" he said with a smile.

As Tejaswin went down a negative spiral after the high jump event, one athlete sought him out. "When I went back completely broken after high jump, the one person who came up to me.. and this is the only person's advice I would have taken at that time... was [Murali] Sreeshankar," Tejaswin said.

"He had the same injury...a lot worse than me, ruptured his tendon. He told me, ‘Just take one event at a time. Show up, warm up for the 100 metres. If it doesn't feel right, stop.' Sree was one of the main reasons," he added.

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Tejaswin Shankar is India's first-ever medallist in two separate events at CWG; the other is high jump in 2022, when he won bronze

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