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.