Arpinder Singhਅਰਪਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘ

Arpinder Singh is an Indian triple jumper from Harsha Chhina, a village in Amritsar district, Punjab. He won the triple jump gold medal at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, the first Indian to win that title in 48 years, and took bronze at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. His personal best of 17.17 metres, set in 2014, stood as an Indian national record.

Early life

Arpinder Singh was born on 30 December 1992 in Harsha Chhina, a small village in Amritsar district with only a few thousand people. Nobody in the village practised athletics, and nobody in his family had been an athlete before him. His father, Jagbir Singh, had served as a soldier in the Indian Army and played hockey and kabaddi, and he believed hard work and routine mattered more than talent alone.

Jagbir woke his son at 3 in the morning to run five kilometres, a routine the boy hated at the time and later credited with preparing him for the life of an athlete. Arpinder has said that becoming an athlete was his dream from the age of 10. Villagers told his father the boy would not do well in life, and the family heard the same doubts for years. His father kept backing him anyway.

As a boy Arpinder tried the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the 400 metres and the long jump. He had no real success in any of them, and for a while it looked as if the doubters might be right.

Finding the triple jump

When Arpinder was 14, his father took him to coach D. S. Bal in Amritsar. Bal watched him and asked him to try the triple jump, saying his height would suit the event. The first month was hard, but the event soon started to make sense to him.

Then came a setback. A bad back injury put him in bed for three months, and at that age three months can feel like a lifetime. People around him said his career might already be over. His father stood by him, and once he recovered he moved to Ludhiana to train under coach S. S. Pannu.

None of this came cheap. The family lived hand to mouth, and his father mortgaged the one and a half acres of land they owned to pay for his training. It was a gamble the whole family took together, and it took years to pay off.

Breakthrough: 17.17 metres and Commonwealth bronze

The investment started to show in 2011, when Arpinder jumped an Indian junior record of 16.63 metres. His big break came in June 2014 at the National Inter-State Championships in Lucknow, where he jumped 17.17 metres. The jump beat his previous best of 16.84 metres, broke the national record held by Renjith Maheshwary, and qualified him for the Commonwealth Games.

Weeks later, at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, he won the bronze medal in the triple jump. He had already won bronze at the 2013 Asian Championships in Pune, and in 2017 he won gold at the Asian Indoor Games in Ashgabat. Step by step, the boy from Harsha Chhina had become one of Asia's best triple jumpers.

How did Arpinder Singh win Asian Games gold?

On 29 August 2018, India's National Sports Day, Arpinder won the triple jump gold medal at the 18th Asian Games in Jakarta with a jump of 16.77 metres. It was India's first gold medal in the men's triple jump at the Asian Games in 48 years. The previous Indian winner had been Mohinder Singh Gill, at the 1970 Asian Games in Bangkok.

The win changed how his home village saw him. Where people had once told his father the boy would amount to nothing, they now came to his family with praise and pride. A few weeks later he tested himself against the best in the world at the Continental Cup in Ostrava, finishing third behind the great American jumper Christian Taylor to take the bronze medal.

Honours and later life

The road to Jakarta had not been smooth. After the Glasgow bronze, Arpinder moved to London and spent ten months training there in the build-up to the 2016 Olympics in Rio. He changed much of his technique in that period, worked harder than ever, and cycled 15 kilometres to and from practice every day, yet his jumping got worse. That year he could not clear 16 metres and never made it to Rio.

He went back to India and rebuilt his training, working twice a day, two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. The distances came back, and in 2018 he was jumping over 17 metres again. He carried a back injury into the Commonwealth Games at Gold Coast in April 2018 and missed out on a medal there, but four months later he was Asian champion.

After the Asian Games he announced a move to the United States to train under Jeremy Fischer, the coach of the American jumper Will Claye, and set himself the target of jumping 17.80 metres. In 2021 he received the Arjuna Award, one of India's highest sporting honours. World Athletics still lists season's bests for him in 2024, showing a career that has stretched well beyond a decade at the top.

Legacy

Arpinder's gold medal mattered beyond his own career. Indian athletics has long been dominated by track events, and his win put a field event, and the triple jump in particular, in front of a new audience. He has said that young people in India now want to take up the triple jump and the javelin, and that more people are paying attention to what Indian field athletes achieve.

For Punjab, his story is a reminder that champions can come from the smallest villages. Harsha Chhina had no athletics tradition when he was growing up, and his family had little money. What it had was a father who believed in his son, coaches who saw what the boy could become, and a young athlete who refused to listen when people told him he would fail.