File picture: P David registered a personal best of 8.22m to win the Men’s Long Jump title at the Indian Athletics Series–10. | Photo Credit: The Hindu

After his second attempt in the long jump competition at the India Athletics Series in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday morning, P David admits he started to relax. The 24-year-old had just jumped an 8.05m. He had officially become the 14th Indian athlete to breach the 8m barrier, a mark widely considered the benchmark of a high-quality long jumper. “At that time I thought I’d done enough to win the competition,” he’d tell Sportstar. That’s when his coach, Keerti Tiwari, came running up to him. “She told me not to be happy or take it easy because it was still early in the competition and I still had more to do,” he says.

There was still work to be done. David fouled his next three jumps and, at the start of his sixth and final attempt, was down in third place, behind Shahnavaz Khan (8.17m) and J Arjunan (8.12m), the latter joining the 8m club himself in Thiruvananthapuram. David would make that last chance count. Catching the wooden take-off board perfectly, he soared past the rest of the field to land at 8.22m. The leap was staggering, nearly 30 centimetres farther than his official personal best of 7.94m, the second-best jump by an Indian this year and enough to catapult him to fourth on the country’s all-time list.

David and those who have followed his journey have long believed he belonged among the elite of Indian long jumpers. It wasn’t without reason. David had crossed the 8m mark twice before, in 2023 and just a couple of weeks earlier, although both occasions had come in the Tamil Nadu State championships and aren’t considered official results owing to a lack of instrumentation. On his day, he had beaten the best in the country, too. Last year, after he’d won gold at the Federation Cup with a jump of 7.94m, his coach Keerti had told this publication that he was capable of more. “He has the ability to jump 8.20m,” she had said then.

But in what has been the story of his career, he has often found himself battling injuries and dips in form right when it seemed he was on the cusp of breaking out. The hope is that his latest turn of fortune lasts longer.

Cricket nut

Although he is now among India’s top jumpers, David didn’t always want to be an athlete. Growing up in Periya Kollapatti, in the Tamil Nadu city of Salem, David says he only started the sport as a ruse to skip studies. “As a child, my parents had put me in tuition classes. But I wanted to go and play cricket with my friends,” he says. His parents, Solomon, a mechanic, and Jayaseeli, weren’t against the idea of him playing sport but wanted a compromise. “My mother said I didn’t have to study if I didn’t want to but I had to seriously play some sport,” he says.

David was taken to the ‘Do Or Die’ academy in Salem to train as an athlete. Although fate, it seemed, was pushing him towards track and field, he had other ideas. “I’d go and train two days of the week in the academy and then on the other five days I’d go with my friends and play cricket. My parents would sometimes ask me why I wasn’t going for any local competitions and I’d say the coach wasn’t taking me,” he says.

It was only after a disappointing result in his Class 12 exams that David says he realised he needed to take track and field seriously. “I have two sisters, both of whom are very intelligent. I thought I, too, would be able to get by on studies. However, I only scored 70 per cent in my Class 12th board exams. I felt that if I wasn’t going to be a good student, I needed to focus on athletics at least,” he says.

That newfound focus unearthed latent talent. “I had been jumping 5.70m at the school level and within six months of my Class 12 results I had jumped 7.02m in a State-level meet,” he says. By 2019, he was jumping 7.45m at the regional championships in Trichy.

Recurring injuries

A knee injury sustained from landing in the hard sand pit at his academy in Salem, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, cost him a year. By 2021, however, David was making impressive progress. He won gold at the junior National Championships in Sangrur and then jumped a personal best at the Under-23 Championships in New Delhi.

That earned him a call-up to the National Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. The move appeared to benefit him early on as he improved to 7.78m at the Federation Cup, but a change in coaches saw his performance slip once again.

In April 2022, he began working with Keerti and the two have been together ever since. Keerti, who, at 32, is one of India’s youngest coaches, says she knew early on that David had what it takes to be an elite jumper. Although he stands just under 5-foot-8 and weighs 73kg, David is deceptively explosive, she says. “He has a muscle quality that’s not common. He can develop a lot of power despite not being the fastest sprinter,” she says.

The partnership has had its share of ups and downs. Every time progress seemed within reach, an injury intervened. The early promise of jumping 8.05m at the Tamil Nadu State Championships was tempered when David suffered a stress fracture to his right foot at the Inter-State a month later. A hamstring tear followed, then hip flexor trouble in 2024. Even after winning the Federation Cup in 2025, another heel stress fracture and then an ankle ligament injury at the World University Games disrupted his progress again.

“It’s been frustrating. I know I had the ability but injuries have always held me back,” he says.

“There have been some tough days,” admits Keerti. “He would see other jumpers like (national record holder) Jeswin Aldrin. They had once competed together at the junior level. He would wonder why someone like Jeswin had become a national record holder and had got the chance to compete at the World Championships and the Olympics while he himself was not getting any good result. I’d tell him to be patient. I’d say that his time would come. He just needed to trust,” she says.

That trust hasn’t always been easy. After his most recent ligament tear at the World University Games, David almost ended up getting surgery before instead being advised to wear a cast for several weeks. While the treatment was non-invasive, it meant he was nowhere near his best when he turned up to compete at the Federation Cup in Ranchi, which was meant to serve as a qualification competition for the Commonwealth Games.

What made matters worse was that, as he kept pushing himself to the limit, his technique began to unravel. At the Federation Cup, he finished seventh after fouling his last four attempts in an attempt to get a competition-winning jump. David looked to have landed around the 8.20m mark in his final attempt but was found to have put his foot down a couple of centimetres into the clay in front of the take-off board. “Whenever I tried to go all out, I’d find myself stepping over the board. I knew I was capable of jumping over 8.30m so I kept stretching myself at the take-off step,” he says.

Big goals

He says he’s slowly learning from his mistakes. “I’ve never been afraid of my competitors or the stage. But what I was doing wrong was thinking I had to always jump big,” he says.

In Thiruvananthapuram, he reckons the three fouls he made after his second jump were for the same reason. Ahead of his last jump, though, David says he focused simply on running smoothly. “I didn’t think of going all out. I jumped at about 90 percent of my ability,” he says.

David says he knows he can jump much farther than he did in Thiruvananthapuram. He’ll have a chance to prove it at the Inter-State Championships in Bhubaneswar in 10 days’ time. The competition will have additional significance. Despite recording the second-best jump by an Indian this year, David’s 8.22m jump came barely half an hour after the Athletics Federation of India announced its Commonwealth Games squad. He didn’t make the cut.

That leaves the Asian Games as the last major competition of the year. David will hope to strengthen his case for selection at the Inter-State Championships. Although the qualification standard is 7.91m, the fact that there are currently six active athletes who have jumped over 8m this season means David will have to be close to his best.

Coach Keerti believes he could do just that. “He had jumped 8m before but that was in a State competition and people never considered it a major stage. This jump (8.22m) was really important for him. It will give him the confidence that he has the ability to produce a big jump like this at a national level competition. His own goal will get bigger. He knows the next target is to jump 8.40m,” she says.

David, however, is reluctant to put a ceiling on his ambitions. “I still don’t know what my potential is. I just know that I want to compete for India at the biggest stage like the Asian Games and the Olympics. I know I have that ability,” he says.

Published on Jun 15, 2026