At the start of the 1500m race, Tejaswin Shankar was exhausted. If you've not heard the name before and you're wondering, 'exhausted at the start... eh?' that's because you don't yet know that Tejaswin is a decathlete, the best India has ever seen, and that the 1500m was his tenth event in two days. As Tejaswin puts it, "after the 9 events, the 15 (1500m) really becomes more of a psychological beast than a physiological [one]."
But there was another beast in front of him, an intangible one- an 8000-point barrier that no Indian had crossed. You see, in the decathlon, points are awarded as per the timings you run or the distances you hit (for example, Tejaswin's excellent 2.25m high jump gave him 1041 points while a poor javelin throw of 47.71m gave him only 555 points) and at the end of nine gruelling events, his points tally stood at 7306. Now, he needed a strong 1500 run.
Speaking to ESPN after the decathlon event at the 2026 Federation Cup, Tejaswin explained why the decathlon 1500 is so tough. "When you train for 10 events, as a track and field athlete, the least you know to do is how to run... the problem is not running, the problem is after that second lap [a lap is 400m], when the cumulative fatigue hits you of all the 10 events and there's so many things that go on in your head." Chief among those things was the timing he needed. After the ninth event, the javelin (in which he was sub-par), he sat down with the points calculator, and he realised he need to run a 4 minute 37 second 1500m to get to the 8000 points.
With a personal 1500 best of 4:30 he knew this was possible, and placing his wife and his sister at strategic intervals around the track to yell out splits, he set off. As they kept ticking off times, he kept keeping at it. At one point, he realised, "I'm 6 seconds faster than what I was supposed to." He says, "That was the magic of the pace that I ran. In the home stretch, that just gave me that extra ounce of energy that I needed and I just sprinted through the finish line and saw the clock and it showed 4:29" A personal best, cranked out at the very end and he'd smashed the 8000 point barrier to finish with 8057.
TEJASWIN ABSOLUTELY BOSSED THE DECATHLON ��
Crosses the elusive 8000-point mark and establishes a new National Record. ��#IndianAthletics #AFI pic.twitter.com/S8RqnHCNPg
- Athletics Federation of India (@afiindia) May 23, 2026
It is a sensational record, one that now pushes the envelope of what Indians can produce in the toughest event in track & field - and it's made even more special by the fact that he remains India's greatest ever high jumper (his record of 2.30m remains untouched).
The switch from high jump to decathlon gives us an insight into his mind -- a change made simply because he wanted to spend more time on the track, to challenge his mind and body even more. Even if high jump remains a legitimate option (without much focused training he jumped 2.25m, which clears the mark set by AFI for Commonwealth Games qualification and would have placed him second in the actual men's high jump competition) he sees it more as an alternative to decathlon than the main event.
In the decathlon, the key to Tejaswin levelling up and hitting 8k was his focus on a simple element: speed.
"One key trait that kind of translates into every single event except for maybe the 1500 is speed, right?" he says. "If you're fast and explosive, you'll run the 100 fast, you'll be able to carry more speed into the long jump. So, it doesn't matter what technique you do, you're still going to land far because you're carrying more energy into the board. Similarly, in the short put, if you're more powerful, you'll be able to hurl the ball farther... 400m again, just a little bit more lactic conditioning on top of your speeds. In the [110m] hurdles, if you're faster, you'll be able to attack the hurdle faster."
This understanding came from training under veteran decathlete turned coach Kip Janvrin. Having gone back to Kansas State University in the US, he got a teaching assistant job while simultaneously pursuing his second master's degree to be able to train under Janvrin. "He's the world record holder for the most 8000 plus decathlons [26]," says Tejaswin. He figured, "he's done it so many times and he's going to help me figure it out."
"His philosophy which we've been able to adopt in the last few months is 'don't think of the combined events as 10 events but it's just one event which you have to navigate'". A prime example of this, says Tejaswin, is the pole vault. Where a traditional pole vaulter is lean and flexible, the traditional decathlete is a much bigger unit (Tejaswin is about 30kg heavier and half a foot taller than Dev Meena, India's pole vault record holder) and that means less height on the vault, heavier poles and a brutal focus on somehow clearing the bar rather than the nailing the perfect, aesthetic technique of the vaulters. That, plus the fact that the vault is the eighth of ten events in the decathlon, attempted while the body is almost at breaking point means the demands are very different.
This causes unique challenges, too. In Ranchi, for instance, only smaller poles were available (since he didn't fly out his own just for this competition) and that meant he went from a 14-step run-up which would have been too much force for the poles into a 8-step run-up and thus was only able to clear 4.20m, well below his PB. He couldn't borrow the big poles from the vaulters either, because those would have snapped under his additional bulk.
It's the sort of nitty-gritty detail that only a decathlete has to face, while the average Indian competitor also has to brave the elements and the administration - the floodlights went out as Tejaswin was completing the high jump, and a malfunction with equipment dragged the pole vault competition on for hours in the blazing Ranchi sun.
No look high jump ������ pic.twitter.com/UihMpW3mVy
- Tejaswin Shankar (TJ) (@TejaswinShankar) May 24, 2026
"It's never easy to adjust," says Tejaswin about jumping in the dark as he bemoans the potential cost of logistical slip-ups for all athletes. "This is also something that India trains you a lot for," he says, with a laugh. "To compete with all these things going on and you still if you're able to kind of pull through with your performance... If I look at it positively a lot of these things make you very resilient because in your mind, you're like without lights working or suddenly if the light goes off and I can still [jump high, or run fast], then on the best stages imagine what I can do.' As his exploits gather national acclaim, these are the things he hopes get looked into, improved.
There's another thing he's worried about. While the AFI declared the Fed Cup to be the CWG qualifiers, they said the Inter-state in June would be the Asiad qualifiers - Tejaswin's hoping he doesn't have to run a second decathlon in two months just to hit a mark he's already cleared easily here (he hit the Asiad qualifying mark of 7300 in the ninth event itself). For that would mean he lands at the CWG an exhausted man.
While he will take that up with the authorities soon, his focus remains clear. This speed training combined with transition training (how to go from high jump, where he naturally jumps towards the end due to his higher ceiling, and dive straight into the 400m with less rest compared to others) has helped him cross one mental barrier. But he knows it's not enough.
"it's very good to be excited about 8,000 but I have to take that with a pinch of salt because if I'm trying to be among the elite... those guys are scoring 8,000 points after nine events not 10,o so I have to find ways to get to that 8,500 point barrier as soon as I can, especially in the next couple years if I want to you know go to the Olympics in 2028."
It's this self-awareness, this clarity of thought, this discipline that has made Tejaswin Shankar India's greatest ever decathlete, and it's exactly that which makes him one of the athletes to watch out for in a big, big year for Indian sport.