"Aargh!"
"Aargh!"
"Aaaaaargh!"
The Inspire Institute of Sport recently shared a video featuring one of JSW's star athletes, Sreeshankar Murali, on their socials. The opening few seconds are straight out of an art film: The one thing you see is Sreeshankar grimace. The one thing you hear is Sreeshankar scream. The one thing you feel is Sreeshankar's pain.
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On September 15, when Sreeshankar steps onto the National Stadium track in Tokyo to take part in the qualifying event for the men's long jump at the 2025 World Athletics Championships, it's that pain that will define his presence there.
It had started in April 2024 when -- coming off the form of his life in 2023 -- he ruptured the patellar tendon on his takeoff leg. The tendon that connected his knee to his shin bone, the tendon responsible for the knee bending had been torn. A few months off his second shot at an Olympics Games, his career was hanging by a thread.
A surgery ("it's like a bio-hack, I now have an augmented knee"), a period of rest and reflection (where he fed himself motivational video after motivational video), and intense rehabilitation (starting with forcing his knee to bend at 30 degrees, walking without crutches and with a normal gait, and then onwards from there), followed. In July-August, mid-rehab period, he appeared as an expert analyst for Sony's coverage of the Indian contingent at the Paris Olympics. He hid it well, but you could sense how much it was hurting him. As he wrote on these pages, "It was too difficult for me to sleep. Even after my surgery, I was finding it difficult to sleep because this thought [of missing the Olympics] was literally haunting me."
Through the pain, though, there was clarity. "What happened was very simple. I just took off, the tendon broke, the dreams were shattered, surgery, recovery, rehabilitation. There is nothing much to think about. That's reality."
A big fan of Kobe Bryant and a firm believer in 'mamba mentality' ethos, he put his head down and got stuck in. It was boring, mundane, repetitive, and it hurt, but that didn't stop him. With these World Championships as his aim, he kept at it. "If any setback happens, 90% [of your recovery] depends on your mindset. How you get back up and keep working towards it..."
His first jump back was 3m, off a 3-step run-up, he told RevSportz recently. That slowly became 4m, then 5m, before he hit 7m for the first time post-surgery exactly a year out from the injury. Soon 8m came and that's when he knew he was ready. "I just gave my body everything and my body gave it all back," he said.
In his first event back, the Indian Open Athletics meet in Pune on July 12, he hit 8.05m (the longest an Indian had jumped across 2024 and 2025) to take the win. 15 months on from career-threatening injury, Sreeshankar had firmly reclaimed the Indian long jumping throne. Even then though, that that World Championships dream looked too far out. His father and coach Murali had told this writer in April that Sreeshankar was looking good again, that his takeoff speed and explosiveness off the board were better than ever before... but to qualify for the Worlds his student-son would have to push his body to the limits yet again.
So, he did. Across a month and a half (July 12 - August 24), Sreeshankar went from Pune to Maia (Portugal) to Almaty (Kazakhstan) to Bhubaneswar to Chennai to hit the five-event mark that would give him a chance via ranking points. He won them all to seal it.
Think about that for a second: You spend nearly a year and a half out injured. In that time, you not only doubt you'll ever compete again, but there's also a worst-case scenario playing in your mind about you ever walking proper again. You come back and throw yourself into the kind of schedule track and field athletes rarely endure. You win everything. That's mamba mentality pro max.
In Tokyo, meanwhile, it won't get any easier. 38 jumpers have jumped more than his best jump this year (8.13m in Bhubaneswar, nearly 0.3 short of his personal best) and they've all been training to peak at these Championships. Considering everything he's gone through, and the short season he's had so far, just qualifying for the final will be a major ask, forget challenging for a medal. The odds are he won't make much of a splash there.
As if Sreeshankar cares about the odds, though. He's already made a comeback of the likes we've rarely seen in Indian sport, and he's back full-time, doing what he loves doing. So, no matter what happens over the next couple of days, Sreeshankar Murali will just keep on keeping on, pain buried deep, that stubborn dedication to 'mamba mentality' stretching his limits day after day after day.