For Vithya Ramraj, running was never supposed to become a career. Growing up in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Vithya and her identical twin sister Nithya came from a modest family. Their father worked as a truck driver and their mother, Meena, was a homemaker. There was no sporting legacy in the family and no elaborate plan to produce athletes. The twins simply played like other children.
Then a school physical education teacher noticed something in them. The teacher suggested that the girls take athletics seriously and advised their mother to enrol them at the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu hostel in Erode, where they could access training and facilities their family could not easily afford. That decision changed the course of their lives.
Vithya gradually found her event in the 400m hurdles. But talent was only the beginning. She joined the national camp at NIS Patiala in 2018. The transition was difficult. She struggled with the food, language and the demands of a highly competitive environment. Later, the COVID-19 disruption and an appendicitis surgery interrupted her preparations.
Eventually, she left the national camp and began training independently under coach Nehpal Singh Rathore. Independence, however, came at a price.
Training, food and accommodation had to be paid for. For a family that had already struggled financially, elite athletics was an enormous burden. Her twin sister Nithya, who had secured a job with the Income Tax Department, stepped in and helped support Vithya’s training until Vithya later joined Indian Railways. Slowly, the years of sacrifice began to show.
At the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, Vithya clocked 55.42 seconds in the 400m hurdles, exactly equalling P.T. Usha’s national record set at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. For 39 years, nobody had gone faster. But equalling the record was not enough.
For the next three years, Vithya carried that number with her. Then came Nagoya.
At the 2026 Asian Games, she crossed the 400m hurdles finish line in 54.75 seconds—0.67 seconds faster than Usha’s mark. She won bronze and, after 42 years, India’s longest-standing women’s athletics record finally changed hands.
But that was only part of her extraordinary Games.
Vithya anchored India’s women’s 4x400m relay team to gold in 3:29.69, India’s first athletics gold of the 2026 Asian Games. She had also won silver in the mixed 4x400m relay, giving her three medals at the Games.
The journey had taken her from a government-aided school in Coimbatore to the national camp, from financial uncertainty to the Olympic stage at Paris 2024, and finally to rewriting the record of one of India’s greatest athletes.
Yet perhaps the most touching part of her journey is what her success meant at home. Vithya has spoken about the pride of reaching a stage where her family could ask her father to stop working as a truck driver. She also bought her mother an aeroplane ticket, giving her a first flight.
On the track, Vithya broke a 42-year-old record. But perhaps her greater achievement was what came before it: She ran far enough to change the life she came from.
