The pace maker

Gulveer Singh is breaking new ground. He is set to be India's first 10,000m runner to qualify directly for the Olympics. But why aren't there more like him? There should be

- Rudraneil Sengupta

Gulveer Singh is so close. Just 220 milliseconds away. (With 1,000 milliseconds in a second, we're talking blink-and-you-miss-it close.)

It will be hard to bet against him becoming India's first 10,000m runner to directly qualify for the Olympics (Surendra Singh ran that distance at Beijing 2008, but on a quota).

Gulveer Singh smashed his own national record by more than 14 seconds last week, at the Ten 2025 athletics meet in California.

Olympic qualification or not, that 27:00.22 finish puts Singh where no Indian has been before: firmly among the elite runners in the world at that distance.

Singh's new national record betters the one he set last year in Japan, which, in turn was an improvement on the 16-year-old national record Singh broke, a few months before the Japan race.