Hima Das accomplished a first in the 200m race at the 18th Edward Listos Memorial in Wroclaw, Poland on Wednesday.
It wasn't that she won the race. It was that the 18-year-old sprinter from the village of Dhing in Assam's Naogaon district clocked just 23.34 seconds.
This ended a streak that had run the course of her admittedly short career. Ever since she was first noticed at the 2016 state championship in Assam, she had always improved on her previous race. This year alone, she clocked 23.59s at the Asian Games test event in February, improved to 23.37s at the Federation Cup in March, and clocked 23.22 last Sunday at a meet in Gliwice, Poland.
It's only a minor quibble. There's little doubt that Hima is perhaps India's most exciting sprinting prospect in recent times. Her time in Gliwice was the second fastest by an Indian in the 200m since 2002. Of course, she had already been marked out for potential greatness owing to the fact that she came sixth in a world class 400m field on what was her debut at the Commonwealth Games in April.
Even so, there were reasons for the aberration in Wroclaw. "It was raining really heavily in Wroclaw. I was speaking to Hima and she was telling me it was very cold," says Nipon Das, the coach who first spotted Hima. "I wasn't sure whether she would even run. But when I spoke to [national coach] Galina Bukharina, she was really happy with her race."
Hima herself isn't particularly torn up about her performance. One reason is that the 200m isn't even her preferred event. She is only in Poland as part of the Indian 400m squad and is running the 200m as a way to improve her speed for the single lap race.
"We [the 400m campers] are in Poland for training and the competition is only to make sure we are progressing in the right way and to avoid injury. We are doing really heavy training with very little speed work, so I'm not going all out here," she says.
Hima wasn't even trying too hard at her race on Sunday, which remains her quickest ever: "I didn't try to run very seriously. I slowed down at the curves. These races are only meant as entertainment."
The fact that she is running some of the best times in Indian athletic history for fun is staggering in its own right. So when will Hima be running seriously?
She won't be trying too hard at the inter-state athletics championships later this month, even though they will serve as the qualifiers to select the Indian team for the Asian Championships. "My target is not the inter-state. It is the World Junior Championships [in July] and the Asian Games [in August]," she says.
"It's easy to forget that she has only been competing at any level for less than two years. She has only been competing internationally for a year," says her coach. "How to prepare for a big race or how to train and eat are things you learn as an athlete. These things take years to pick up. But for Hima, she is improving and learning with every competition. Mark my words -- she is going to do something great at the Worlds and Asian Games."
Indeed, the two gold medals she won in Poland aren't particularly important for her.
"No one is looking at medal, timing hi dekh rahe hain (we are just monitoring the timing, not the medal)," she says. "It wasn't the best yesterday, but It will only get better. The real test will be at the Worlds and Asian Games. Those are the medals and races that matter."