Asian Games 2026 - Four women, four reasons to run: Inside India’s golden relay triumph

Four Indian women fused strategy and endurance to topple Bahrain and its star runner Salwa Eid Naser, sealing gold in the 4x400m relay at Nagoya despite testing conditions and the pressure of a largely gold-deficient Asian Games outing for the contingent. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

On a rainy Tuesday night in Nagoya, it took a team effort to help Indian athletics avoid its worst-ever performance in 32 years at the Asian Games. That team worked as one to get the better of the best quartermiler in Asia to win the women’s 4x400m relay gold for the seventh time in eight editions of the Asiad.

At the Mizuho Stadium, everyone’s eyes were on Bahrain’s Salwa Eid Naser as she sauntered out onto the track at the start of the final lap in the women’s 4x400m relay race. A floral tattoo crawls all the way up her powerfully muscled right quadriceps. She’s all leonine poise, seemingly without a care in the world, like she owned the place. She probably did. She’s Bahrain’s trump card in the relay. They had saved their best — Asia’s best — for last.

Salwa is a former world champion and the current Olympic silver medallist. In Nagoya, she ran the quarter mile in 49 seconds and change to win the individual title. She was more than three seconds clear of second place. It doesn’t matter what anyone else does. Salwa believes innately that she will beat them.

The rest of the anchor runners seem to know it as they stood in single file ahead of the final baton exchange. They all looked at her as they waited: her royal swiftness, the Asian queen of the single lap. Everyone but the Indian: Vithya Ramraj.

For two and a half minutes, all she did was look at her teammates, almost willing them on to just give her something to work with, to give her just enough to hold off .

The 400m relay isn’t won by one person’s brilliance, even if that person is Salwa Eid Naser. It goes to the best team. And India’s best hope was to make it impossible even for the Nigerian-Bahraini behemoth to chase it down.

At the start of the race, the plan was clear to the Indian quartet. “We knew what we had to do. We knew that Salwa would be hard to beat. We needed to give Vithya 50 meters,” Kiran Pahal recalled after the final.

The 26-year-old is from Ghummad village in Haryana’s Sonepat district. “ Bohot chota gaon hai sir. Bohot choti soch (It’s a very small village sir, and equally small exposure)”.

Kiran is running today because her father, Om Prakash, a farmer, supported her. “He used to coach me when I was young. He came with me because the people in my village didn’t think girls should be allowed to run in shorts.”

Her father didn’t live to see her run in Nagoya, having passed in 2022. But he did give her a gold necklace before his demise.

“We didn’t even have any money back then. I’ve no idea how he afforded it. But he told me, ’Here is your chain until you win a medal of your own’,” she remembered.

Kiran was wearing that chain as she entered the stadium. She tucked it safely back into her blue India vest. The night before the final, she admitted to thinking about her father, who had stuck his neck out for her. She remembered thinking about the villagers who had once tried to stop her from running sending her messages of good luck ahead of her race.

On the track though, blinkers came on. “I gave my 100 percent,” Kiran stated.

ALSO READ | TN CM Vijay’s rewards for Vithya touch Rs. 1.55 crore after relay gold

Kiran passed the baton to MR Poovamma. At 36, she’s the oldest member of the entire Indian athletics contingent. She’s been running before some of the other Indian medallists from these games were even born.

She has four Asian Games medals herself, including gold in the same event in 2018. She has represented India at the 2024 Paris Olympics. But over the last few years, she’s been reminded of her age. She sometimes wonders about it herself.

“I felt I was slowing down,” Poovamma exclaimed. “I’m 36. I didn’t know if I could run 53 seconds any more.”

Her husband Jithin Paul — a former Asian Games finalist himself in the 400m hurdles — pushed her when she considered leaving in 2024.

“He told me I can do two more years. This is his plan not mine,” she beamed.

Paul did more than just sound supportive. “After marriage, so many women athletes think about leaving sports. But my husband kept encouraging me. He used to go to his office, work and then come home and cook dinner for me. All this was so that I don’t have any difficulties when I train,” Poovamma recalled.

And that training had to show on Tuesday night.

“We knew that apart from Salwa, every other runner was roughly the same level. I had to stay close to the leader who was going forward. I had to do this so that Prachi doesn’t have to fight for position in the third leg,” she explained.

After the first hundred meters of Poovamma’s leg, the lanes merged. She was in fourth place at that point. But as she came around the bend, she started to accelerate. She went past Japan’s Shizuho Moriyama. On the back straight, she gritted her teeth and surged ahead of Bahrain’s Sufiyan Abdulghani. When she held her hand with the baton to Prachi, only China was in front.

Once wondering whether she was too old to compete, Poovamma felt she had turned back the clock.

“I felt as if I was 22 again and running in the Asian Games for the first time. I think I ran one of the best races of my life. I can’t believe I ran it at 36,” she exclaimed.

If Poovamma couldn’t believe she’s competing at her age, Prachi often wondered if she’d left it too late to come into athletics. Growing up in Jhabiran, a village in Western Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur district, she was a straight-A science student who wandered into sports only when she was in her late teens.

“I was a science student. I studied Physics, Chemistry and maths. I started sports when I was doing my graduation. I know I started after everyone else usually does. It’s always been held against me. I never got sponsorships because I don’t have any results as a junior.... But I wasn’t ever a junior athlete,” Prachi reminisced.

The advantage of starting as late as she did is that, even at 28, Prachi is still improving. She won a bronze in the individual 400m just a few days back. But she knows gold means something entirely different.

“If you get a gold at the Asian Games, the UP government makes you a DSP (Deputy Superintendent of Police). I had got the measurements of my uniform made before I came to Nagoya,” she gushed after the race.

But for that result to come through, Prachi knew she has to let another runner be the star and that’s Vithya.

I had to give her as much of a lead as I could. Salwa toh God hai, cover kar sakti hai (Salwa is God; she can make it up). At least a 40m lead, that’s what I had to give (Vithya),” she narrated.

For all its struggles in this campaign, a little luck went India’s way this time. Prachi was second after China’s Zhou Li. Bahrain’s Zenab Fyofuoba was a few lengths behind her and attacked Prachi, cutting the gap. At the 200m mark. it looked as if Prachi was going to get caught.

A fatal error followed.

The 400m is about endurance as much as it is about sprinting. Zenab has burned herself out too early. As she springboarded around the curve, Prachi pulled away steadily as Zenab sank down the leaderboard like a rock.

Watching from the sidelines, waiting to come into the track, Vithya, her heart pounding, suddenly felt a sigh of relief. “Prachi ran that last 100m so good,” she said later.

When Vithya got the baton, she had more than the 40m lead Prachi wanted to carve out for her. Salwa was jumping impatiently on the track as Zenab approached her. When she got the baton, a little over five seconds after Vithya had received hers, Salwa was in last place.

Vithya had already taken off by then. Only behind China.

Even as she sprinted, she debated what to do. Should she run fast and risk not having enough left for when Salwa inevitably made her charge? Should she hold herself and risk not running fast enough?

ALSO READ | ‘Toofan bhi agar aa jaye’: How Neeru Dhanda battled illness, rain and cold for Asian Games gold in trap shooting

Just 24 hours ago, Vithya had smashed a 42-year-old Indian record in the women’s 400m hurdles. But Vithya still felt something was lacking. She only had a bronze. Although she had made the podium, it was another nation’s anthem that had played.

“I’ve run so many races in my life. But I had heard the national anthem before. In my life, I should hear the national anthem at least once in an international race,” she declared.

If Vithya was dreaming of hearing the national anthem play, the rest of her teammates who had given her that chance were cheering at the top of their voices. Prachi has been Vithya’s roommate every time they’ve been in the national camp together. As roommates do, they’ve taught each other swear words in Hindi and Tamil, respectively. “Absolutely filthy stuff!” Prachi conceded later.

On Vithya’s last lap, the frenzied cheering came out in a mixture of Tamil and Hindi. “ Chal, chal, chal, odu, odu” she yelled.

Vithya herself thought. “They trusted in you. They did everything they could for you. Don’t you dare let them down”

Eventually, Vithya took the lead from China at the 200m mark. Salwa magnificently made her way from eighth to third. On the home stretch, she came within a dozen meters of Vithya, but it was too much to do.

Salwa couldn’t maintain the blistering pace she set for 350m. She had nothing more to give and Vithya pulled ahead once again.

Vithya got the grandstand finish, but this race belonged to India. At the finish line, the four runners embraced as one. When they stepped on the podium, they did so as one.

“If it wasn’t a team effort we couldn’t have won gold,” Vithya said.