ਗੁਰਿੰਦਰਵੀਰ ਸਿੰਘਗੁਰਿੰਦਰਵੀਰ ਸਿੰਘ

Gurindervir Singh (born 24 December 2000) is an Indian sprinter from Patial village in Punjab's Jalandhar district, and the fastest Indian man in history over 100 metres. On 23 May 2026 he ran 10.09 seconds at the Federation Cup in Ranchi, becoming the first Indian to break the 10.10 second barrier. He also holds India's national records in the 60 metres indoors and the 4x100 metres relay, and he serves as a Petty Officer in the Indian Navy.

Early life in Patial

Gurindervir was born on 24 December 2000 in Patial, a village of 918 people in Bhogpur tehsil of Jalandhar district, about 9 kilometres from the town of Bhogpur and 33 kilometres north of Jalandhar city. He grew up in a family where sport was part of daily life. His father, Kamaljit Singh, is a retired assistant sub-inspector in the Punjab Police and a former national level volleyball player, and his grandfather served in the Indian Army and played kabaddi.

As a boy he watched athletics on television whenever he could, and the performances of Usain Bolt at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 first made him want to sprint. He has told how he used to polish his father's medals and trophies during Diwali and listen to stories of his playing days. When his mother once told him to switch the television off, he answered that one day she would be looking for him on it. A year later, he says, that is exactly what happened.

His father enrolled him in schools with strong sports facilities and moved him to Jalandhar to train. At the Punjab Institute of Sports academy there he came under coach Sarabjit Singh Happy, known as Happy, who built the early foundations of his sprinting.

Junior success and the long climb

Gurindervir announced himself as a teenager. At the Asian Under-18 Championships in Bangkok in 2017 he won gold in the 100 metres in 10.77 seconds and gold in the medley relay. The next year he took bronze with India's 4x100 metres relay team at the Asian Under-20 Championships in Gifu, Japan. In 2019 he won silver in the 4x100 metres relay at the South Asian Games in Kathmandu and finished sixth in the individual 100 metres.

His senior breakthrough came at the Indian Grand Prix 1 in Patiala in February 2021, where he clocked 10.32 seconds and beat the reigning national record holder Amiya Kumar Mallick, who finished second in 10.39. In 2022 he joined the Indian Navy through the sports quota, which gave him a steady income and the backing of the armed forces while he trained. He now serves as a Petty Officer.

Progress after that was steady rather than sudden. He raced on the European circuit in 2025, won the 4x100 metres relay at the Taiwan Athletics Open in 38.75 seconds, and kept trimming his times. About eighteen months before the Federation Cup in 2026 he joined the Reliance Foundation High Performance Centre in Mumbai, where English coach James Hillier took charge of his training.

The night he ran 10.09

The 29th National Senior Athletics Federation Competition in Ranchi, in May 2026, produced one of the great evenings in Indian athletics. In the semi-finals Gurindervir ran 10.17 seconds to break the national record. Minutes later, in the next semi-final, his training partner Animesh Kujur ran 10.15 and took the record away. In the final the next day, Gurindervir ran 10.09 seconds to win gold and take the record back. Animesh finished second in 10.20 and Pranav Pramod third in 10.29.

The time made him the first Indian man to run the 100 metres in under 10.10 seconds, and the second fastest Asian of the season, behind only the Japanese teenager Fukuto Komuro on 10.08. It also cleared the 10.16 second qualifying mark for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. The national record had stood at 10.26 seconds, set by Amiya Kumar Mallick in 2016, before Gurindervir and his rivals began pulling it down.

The record was the product of a careful rebuild. Hillier found a sprinter who relied too much on muscular force and faded in the last part of races. Over eighteen months the coaching team stripped away excess upper body weight, rebuilt his running around the elastic work of his tendons, and worked through the race in pieces: the first four steps, the first 30 metres, then the 70 to 80 metre zone where races are won. Earlier in the season he had set the indoor 60 metres national record of 6.60 seconds at the National Indoor Championships in Bhubaneswar in March 2026.

Hillier has said the group does not talk about running under ten seconds. It talks about 9.98. That number is now the stated target for a sprinter who, at 25, believes his best years are still ahead of him.

What happened at the Commonwealth Games?

The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in July 2026 brought Gurindervir back to earth. Named in India's 32 member athletics squad on the strength of his Ranchi run, he went out in the heats of the 100 metres, finishing 28th in 10.39 seconds. It was a sharp disappointment after the high of May, and a reminder that a national record guarantees nothing on a major championship start line.

He took the setback as part of the job. The Games had always been a staging post rather than the destination, with the Asian Games in Japan only weeks away, and his coaching team treated Glasgow as a lesson in championship racing rather than a verdict on his season.

Asian Games and the 2026 season

At the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya in September 2026, Gurindervir began his 100 metres campaign on 24 September and won bronze with India in the mixed 4x100 metres relay. It was his first Asian Games medal and it closed a season in which he had rewritten the Indian record books twice over.

By the end of 2026 he held India's national records in the 100 metres, the 60 metres indoors and the 4x100 metres relay. He had also become the public face of a new generation of Indian sprinters, a group Hillier calls a golden generation, in which training partners such as Animesh Kujur push each other faster in every session. All three medal winners in the Ranchi 100 metres final came from the same Reliance training group.

Why Gurindervir Singh matters

Gurindervir matters because he moved a line that Indian sprinting had treated as fixed. For a decade the 100 metres national record sat at 10.26 seconds, and the idea that an Indian could run under 10.10 was talked about as a distant hope. A boy from a village of fewer than a thousand people, running on the support of a policeman father, a Navy job and a modern training centre, crossed it in a single season.

He also stands in a Punjabi sprinting line that runs back to Milkha Singh, the Flying Sikh, who made the 400 metres final at the Rome Olympics in 1960. Where Milkha's story was about Partition and rebuilding, Gurindervir's is about a system: academies, a professional foundation, sports science and a group of rivals who train together. If he reaches the 9.98 his coach talks about, he will be the first Indian to run the 100 metres in under ten seconds, and the village of Patial will have produced one of the fastest men Asia has seen.