Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
How does a person feel when they crash down from the top of the world?
Ask Avinash Sable, India’s premier 3000m steeplechase runner. He knows.
Sable is a legend of sorts in Indian athletics. In the men’s 3000m steeplechase, he is the closest thing India has to a Neeraj Chopra. A subedar in the Indian Army, Sable has broken the national record 10 times.
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He won gold at the 2022 Asian Games and became the only Indian to have raced in an Olympic steeplechase final. By 2025, Sable was at the pinnacle of his career.
He had reached a point where everything seemed to be falling into place. Then, at the Monaco Diamond League, he came crashing down at the water jump.
While attempting the water jump, Sable failed to land correctly and tore his Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL), a career-threatening injury for the then 31-year-old. In the space of a few seconds, everything he had built was thrown into uncertainty.
“It was not even my fault,” Avinash Sable told a rapt group of reporters in Delhi, right before the Asian Games.
Included in the Asian Games athletics contingent, Sable had come to New Delhi to prove his fitness. If he did well and beat the cut-off (8:36.57s), he could board the flight for Aichi-Nagoya in Japan.
The crowd, then, settled in for seven and a half laps.
THE MAGIC OF STEEPLECHASE
A 3000m steeplechase is a fascinating race in itself. An athlete has to hurdle 28 barriers and seven water jumps over 7.5 laps, all while maintaining the rhythm and endurance required to run three kilometres. One misstep can cost precious seconds. One bad landing can cost much more.
For elite athletes, the race lasts between eight and 10 minutes, with African runners having dominated the event for decades. Sable, meanwhile, holds the fastest time among active Asian runners, with a personal best of 8:09.91.
Racing against fellow Indian runners was never going to be the biggest test for Sable. He started by following the pacer and, by the midway point, had left the rest of the field well behind. The gap became so large that he eventually eased off significantly, finishing in 8:32.39, a time well below his best.
But by then, the clock barely mattered. More significantly, this was the first steeplechase race Sable had finished in 14 months.
I WAS SCARED: AVINASH SABLE
After the event, Sable spoke in such a soft voice and with such precision that it was difficult not to sense the pain of a runner who had spent more than a year away from the event that had defined his career.
“I was scared,” Sable said to the reporters after his run.
“2025 was the time when I felt that I was probably in the best phase of my life. I was thinking that I would improve my personal best and do even better. But in the first lap, I fell because of another athlete. It wasn’t really my fault. I was trying to save the athlete in front of me because otherwise he might have got injured. At that moment, I did not realise that I could suffer such a serious injury,” Sable said about his injury in July 2025.
“A lot of people told me that perhaps I should stay out of steeplechase, that I was not going to make a comeback. They told me to try 5,000 or 10,000. But my heart could not agree. The event that has given me everything, how could I leave it?” he added.
An Athletics Federation of India physio told India Today a coordinated effort was made to assess Sable immediately after his fall. The ACL and meniscus injury were quickly identified, and Sable underwent knee surgery later that month.
But when Sable recovered from the injury, he was not the same man. No one is.
He spent many nights crying in bed, knowing that there was no certainty he would ever come back as strong as he had been before.
Sable described those struggles as being worse than when he had first started out in sport. It was almost as if the memory of the athlete he had once been had been erased, and he had to build a new version of himself from scratch.
It took time to rebuild both the physical and mental aspects of his life as an athlete, but Sable eventually returned to training.
THE CWG 2026 THAT GOT AWAY
The army man wanted to make his comeback at the Commonwealth Games. His recovery had gone well enough for him to believe he could win a medal, perhaps even gold.
But another setback followed.
“I was back in proper training by March. But I suffered a shin injury in May, and the whole month I dealt with that. The CWG dream slipped away.”
This was an insignificant injury than the one he had suffered a year earlier, and Sable was able to get back to work. After training at SAI Bengaluru under Kalyan Chaudhary, he slowly returned to the competition circuit.
“For my comeback, I want to thank the Athletics Federation of India from the bottom of my heart. They believed in me and gave me an opportunity to go to the Asian Games, despite me being away due to injury.”
“My coach, Kalyan Chaudhary, has worked extremely hard with me in Bengaluru. We had training partners doing 1,500-metre runs and long repetitions with me. I would also like to thank all those athletes who kept motivating me and telling me, ‘Avinash, you can do it. You have the capacity to come back. Don’t give up’.”
SABLE IN ASIAN GAMES
Now Sable will race at the Asian Games, having earned his place in the Indian athletics contingent. He will line up in the men’s steeplechase final on September 28, under the lights in Nagoya, believing he can challenge for a medal while keeping his expectations measured.
His main competition is expected to come from the Japanese runners and Qatar’s Zakaria Al Ahlaami.
“I have competed against many of these athletes before. I competed at the Commonwealth Games and other international competitions, including the previous Asian Games and Asian Championships,” Sable said.
“So I have that confidence. I am carrying that confidence with me, believing that I can win a medal,” he concluded.
There is, perhaps, a strange symmetry to Sable’s return. The steeplechase is a race built around obstacles, where an athlete has to find a rhythm and then find it again after every barrier and every water jump. Over the past 14 months, Sable has had to do much the same.
He has had to rebuild a knee, rebuild his confidence and accept that the athlete he was before Monaco may not be the athlete who returns to the starting line in Nagoya. Yet the one thing he never allowed himself to abandon was the steeplechase itself.
Now, after 14 months away, Sable is back where he wanted to be all along, standing at the start of the race that gave him everything. The fear, the tears and the uncertainty of those long months are still part of his story, but they do not define where it ends.
He has come through the depths of despair and emerged as a different athlete, and perhaps a different man, ready to take on the barriers once again.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
