Mumbai: A light drizzle patters down on the athletics track in Ulwe, a quiet expanse in Navi Mumbai, where India’s top hurdlers and sprinters are undergoing a high-intensity training session.

Jyothi Yarraji is taking it a little easy, though she still shouts her lungs out cheering for others through their rigorous repetitions. Later, inside the gym, Jyothi confesses that she doesn’t get most of her coach’s jokes. James Hillier often has to repeat, explain, and wait for her reaction.

“But then she misses the punchline!” Hillier sighs.

There was a time when Jyothi would miss much more than that.

In the early days of their association three years ago, when the Englishman articulated instructions in his British accent, the shy girl from Andhra would merely nod and say, “OK”.

“One day he asked me, ‘Do you really understand what I’m telling you?’ I said, ‘No, Coach, I don’t understand anything.’ He said, ‘Then why are you saying yes!’” Jyothi recalls, laughing. “He used to speak very fast. Gradually, he slowed down, adjusted, and spoke in a way I could understand.”

Not only did Jyothi and Hillier overcome language barriers, but also literal barriers on the track to transform Jyothi into India’s top female hurdler. She will represent the country in the women’s 100m hurdles at the Paris Olympics, a first in Indian athletics. From struggling to break the 13-second mark in 2021, she equalled her national record of 12.78 seconds in 2024, surpassing her own mark multiple times.

Language wasn’t the only thing that needed work when Jyothi checked into the high-performance athletics centre of Reliance Foundation to work with Hillier, its athletics director in 2021. “She had really good natural qualities — good tendons, good natural speed. She looked like an athlete,” Hillier said.

She didn’t feel like one though. A significant injury involving a meniscus tear had wiped almost a year off Jyothi’s budding career, and a large part of her confidence. The first thing Hillier told her was that “this is as low as it could get”, and with that began the rebuilding process — session by session, hurdle by hurdle.

For Jyothi, gaining confidence was a significant leap for her as a person. Growing up in Vizag amid humble surroundings, Jyothi felt almost invisible. “When I was in school, nobody cared about what I did or said,” she recalled.

She shifted to the Sports Authority of India hostel in Hyderabad in 2016, training under Dronacharya awardee coach N Ramesh while residing with other girls. It is only when she joined forces with Hillier that she began living alone. “If I had never stayed alone, I wouldn’t have known my personality. I was dependent on a lot of people earlier. Now I have the confidence that I can do things alone.”

“When I came here, my thought was only to listen to and follow the coach. I did that, and it showed in my performance gradually.”

At the 2022 Federation Cup in April, she would better Anuradha Biswal’s national record but was not counted (she clocked 13.09s) on account of high wind speed, a second such instance that her mark had to be wiped off. She would script it again the following month, lowering it three times — from 13.23s to 13.11s to 13.04s — in Europe while dipping below the 13-second mark later that year. Jyothi has since rewritten that national mark several times over the last year-and-a-half.

That record-breaking Europe trip in May 2022 was Jyothi’s first overseas outing. It left her overwhelmed. Jyothi would go wherever her coach went, and order whatever he did at restaurants. “I was scared. I felt I wasn’t ready.” Reason why in her first multi-sport event, the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, she couldn’t progress beyond the heats. She would soon feel ready. At the World University Games last year, Jyothi brought down her national record to 12.78s and at the Hangzhou Asian Games, stood up for herself against a bizarre disqualification to win silver (12.91s).

“All the work we had done, on and off the track, helped me fight for myself at the Asian Games,” Jyothi said.

The drama in that 100m hurdles final was for everyone to see. What wasn’t was how furious Hillier was before that final. Jyothi also competed in the 200m where, taking it a “little easy” with an eye on the hurdles final, she couldn’t get through her heat. Accepting that she had “messed up”, Jyothi was in for stern words after that race.

“When he was angry, I wanted to prove to him that I was angry too. For the final, even if the hurdles had to be hit, broken, I didn’t care,” Jyothi said.

It was the only time Hillier had “shouted” at Jyothi, she says. Hillier wants to make her an athlete responsible for her own actions. This year, Jyothi made a technical change of taking seven strides instead of eight in getting to her first hurdle. The idea was Hillier’s, but the nod came from Jyothi.

“In 2021, it was me telling her. In 2024, it’s her telling me,” Hillier says. “If she makes decisions, it’s 100 times more powerful than me making it for her. I used to coach her. Now I manage her. That’s how our relationship has evolved.”

Off the track too. From not being confident enough to make her own food choices at restaurants, Jyothi makes supermarket trips alone overseas to shop for provisions and cook for Hillier and his family. Her best dish, Jyothi reckons, is carrot halwa. The first thing she cooked for Hillier was “Italian pasta”. “’It’s good, but not that much’,” Jyothi recalled Hillier as saying, looking towards him.

“No, no, she is very good,” the coach says. “She’s very creative, be it with her cooking or paintings.”

Hillier’s wife Alyce is Jyothi’s shopping companion. Their kids, Isla and William, love Jyothi, who often babysits them. “Every time I ask her if you want to come to the track,” Hillier says of his daughter, she asks: ‘will Jyothi be there’?”

Jyothi will surely be in Paris, eager to do what she has done with remarkable consistency in the last couple of years. “I just want to do my best,” she says. It would be her first Olympic experience, and another significant springboard towards her growth as a hurdler.

For Jyothi, though, her development as a person far outshines that as an athlete.

“In my family, there is no girl who has gone out and done things like this. My parents are so proud,” she said. “What makes me happy is the change in my personality.”

“But I’m not satisfied with what I’ve achieved. I want more. I don’t want to be famous, really. I want to be successful. I want to feel that I deserved this.”

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