When he heads to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in a few days time, Murali Sreeshankar will be amongst the medal favourites. His season’s best of 8.38m recorded last month at the Inter State Athletics Championships is the second best jump amongst his competitors in Glasgow. But Sreeshankar knows he’s got even more in him. That jump he says was an ‘incomplete’ one. At Glasgow he says he hopes he can uncork that perfect jump and in doing so improve on the silver he won at the 2022 Games in Birmingham.
By any standard 8.38m was a world class mark – it places him eighth in the world this year. It’s all the more significant considering the 27-year-old was making his return from a serious knee injury he had suffered two years ago. Sreeshankar, in an interaction from his training base in Spala, Poland, says technical flaws in his take-off and landing meant he was well short of his true potential.
“After the competition in Bhubaneswar everybody was happy because I got an 8.38 jump after surgery. But I certainly felt it was not an 8.38 day. There is a big jump still in me,” Sreeshankar said.
“My approach was fairly good, but technically the jump wasn’t complete. During the flight phase, my body went into forward rotation. When that happens, your landing suffers because you’re trying to control the rotation instead of extending fully into the pit. I actually rolled over during the landing, which almost never happens to me,” he says. “People saw 8.38m, but I saw an incomplete jump. If my body position had been right, I could have added another 20 or 25 centimetres,” he said.
But even though it wasn’t perfect, Sreeshankar says there’s plenty of confidence he could take away from that performance. “The encouraging part is that I’m producing those distances even when my technique isn’t perfect. That tells me my physical condition is very good,” he says.
Get all the elements together and Sreeshankar says he could get his perfect jump. “The approach has to be right. The take-off has to be right. Your body position during the flight has to be right. The landing has to be right. If I walk away feeling that I executed every one of those aspects properly, then I consider it a perfect jump,” he says.
He’s actually had one instance where he came close to achieving that ideal jump. It came, he says, not in a major event or even a final, but in a qualification round at the 2023 Inter State Athletics Championships also in Bhubaneswar where he jumped 8.41m. “That jump felt almost perfect. I couldn’t think of anything I would have done differently. The recent 8.38m wasn’t like that. In the very next jump I did 8.26m where technically my body position was much better, but I didn’t get enough height off the board. Those are the small details I have to get right. When all those elements come together in the same jump, I believe something special will happen,” he says.
If there’s one place for those elements to come together, then Sreeshankar hopes it will be at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow? Sreeshankar thinks so as well.
“Last time I won the silver medal with a jump of 8.08m. Recently, I happened to watch the video of that final again and realised just how close it was. There was only one centimetre separating the gold and silver medallists. This time, I’m hopeful of changing the colour of that medal,” he says.
Sreeshankar though knows that that objective won’t come easy. The athletics events at the Commonwealth Games he admits are at a high level of difficulty, certainly more so than the Asian Games in a couple of months time. “In most events, I would say the Commonwealth Games are a notch above the Asian Games in terms of competition. If you look at Olympic and World Championship finals, you’ll usually find athletes from Commonwealth countries, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas represented in almost equal proportions. That tells you about the quality of competition. This time the challenge will again be very high. We have athletes from Jamaica, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and several African nations who have all been performing well this season. I believe these Commonwealth Games will also set the tone for the new Olympic cycle leading towards Los Angeles. A strong performance here will give us tremendous momentum going forward,” he says.
As hard as the competition will be, Sreeshankar is optimistic about India’s chances of improving on the eight medals won at the Birmingham Games. In the build up to the Commonwealth Games, a number of national records in track and field were broken. “Right now, Indian athletics is in a very good place. We have seen numerous national records being broken and personal bests improving across disciplines. In field events, especially—men’s long jump, men’s triple jump, women’s long jump, men’s high jump, javelin throw and even pole vault—the performances are now comparable to international standards,” he says.
World class standards
This improvement is particularly obvious in the men’s long jump, according to him. “Eight metres used to be considered a huge barrier in Indian long jump. Once an athlete crossed eight metres, it felt like a major milestone,” he says.
That isn’t the case any more. “When I went into the Inter-State Championships this year, I was only the fourth-ranked Indian on the season list. We now have four Indian jumpers beyond 8.20 metres and two who have gone beyond 8.30 metres. This competition has made all of us better. Whenever I compete in India now, I know I have to be at my absolute best. I can’t just turn up expecting to win with an average jump because someone else will beat me. That’s exactly how the standard of an event improves. I also believe India has a genuine chance of winning two medals in the men’s long jump if both of us (Lokesh Sathyanathan who has a seasons best of 8.21m) perform to our potential,” he says.
As hard as they are, Sreeshankar has added motivation to do well. He wants to make up for lost time. He had been in great form going into the Paris Olympics but had been forced to pull out after tearing his ACL ligament – ultimately needing to undergo surgery. “There was a time after my injury when almost everyone thought my career was over. I had ruptured the patellar tendon in my take-off leg. For a long jumper, that’s about as serious as it gets. At one stage, even jumping again seemed like a distant dream. Fortunately, the recovery went well and the people around me supported me throughout the process. Now I’m grateful to be back competing at this level,” he says.
“Right now, my preparations are on point. I’ve recovered really well after the surgery in 2024. The 2025 season was extremely important because it was my comeback year. I managed a couple of jumps over eight metres and, more importantly, qualified for the World Championships. That helped lay the foundation for this season. The biggest confidence for me is that physically I feel better than I ever have since the surgery. During rehabilitation I was able to work on many aspects of my strength and athleticism that I couldn’t focus on while competing. I genuinely feel I’m in the best physical condition of my career after surgery, and I’m really excited about competing in Glasgow,” he says.
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Published on Jul 22, 2026