Run, Dutee, Run

India’s fastest woman is pushing the boundaries to further her sport and shatter gender and sexuality stereotypes

- Shriya Mohan

The four athletes, chattering away between mouthfuls of breakfast, pause. “She’s here,” one of them exclaims,” rushing to the window at the sound of a car approaching the quiet lanes of Bhubaneswar’s Patia residential colony.

Dutee Chand gets a rock-star welcome each day when she returns home from her morning practice. Chand is India’s fastest female sprinter, and holds the national record in the 100-metre dash. She clocks the distance in 11.22 seconds: that’s roughly the time it would take someone to say the English alphabet twice.

Chand is training hard to qualify for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. In 2016, her record was 11.32 seconds; she brought it down by 100 milliseconds last October — no easy feat in a 100-m race, where every millisecond counts. Her goal is to shave it by another 100 milliseconds to make it past the 11.15 Olympic qualifier benchmark this year.

“It’s tough. It takes years to conquer each millisecond,” the 24-year old sprinter says.

She is 4’9” tall, but carries an aura of invincibility. It’s hard to tell whether that comes from the confident bounce in her walk, her flailing brawny arms — as if she’s about to dash forward — or her tight ponytail with not a strand out of place. Or, perhaps, it’s simply her unbreakable smile. She has been on the track since 6 am and is still full of energy at 11 am. For the young, starry-eyed athletes at the breakfast table, who made it from the interiors of poverty-stricken Odisha to the capital for training sessions enabled by Chand, she is an idol.

She has taken the large, two-storeyed house, a few metres from her own government-provided bungalow, on rent, to give aspiring athletes a chance to make their mark on the tracks. Chand currently hosts ten young athletes, providing them with lodging, food and a personal coach.