Tejaswin Shankar was not supposed to become an athlete. Growing up in Delhi, he was more interested in cricket. He played the game until Class 8, dreaming, like many young boys, of a future on the cricket field. Then one day, his physical education teacher noticed something others hadn’t his height, athleticism and natural ability to jump. He was encouraged to try the high jump.
That small suggestion changed the direction of his life. Tejaswin began competing in school athletics and soon started winning medals. But while the boy was discovering athletics, his family was not convinced that it could become a career.
His father, Harishankar, was a lawyer and had represented the Board of Control for Cricket in India. He wanted his son to concentrate on academics, study law and eventually join the family profession. If Tejaswin was going to choose a sport, his father felt cricket made more sense. Athletics, particularly high jump, seemed too uncertain a path.
There was another worry. His father was battling blood cancer, and the family was already dealing with the uncertainty that came with his illness. But Tejaswin wanted athletics.
At 15, he wrote his father an emotional letter asking for the chance to pursue his dream. His father eventually gave him his blessing. It was a decision that would change everything.
Tejaswin began rising through the ranks of Indian athletics. He became a national-level high jumper and, in 2015, won gold at the World School Games and the Commonwealth Youth Games. A year later, he won silver at the South Asian Games.
Then came the opportunity that took him much farther from home. In 2017, Tejaswin received a four-year athletics scholarship to Kansas State University in the United States. There, he wasn’t simply an Indian athlete trying to make his mark abroad. He became one of the strongest collegiate high jumpers in the country.
He won the NCAA Division I outdoor high jump title in 2018 and later returned to win it again in 2022. He also established himself as India’s national record holder in the high jump, clearing 2.29 metres.
But the journey came with a personal loss that would stay with him. In 2014, his father died from blood cancer. The man who had once worried whether athletics could give his son a future was no longer there to see how far that decision would take him.
Tejaswin carried on. In 2022, he returned to India for the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and won bronze in the high jump India’s first-ever Commonwealth Games medal in the event.
But somewhere along the way, Tejaswin began wanting more. High jump was no longer enough.
He moved into the decathlon one of athletics’ most demanding events, requiring an athlete to compete across ten disciplines involving sprinting, jumping, throwing and endurance.
It was an enormous gamble. He was moving from being an established specialist to becoming a complete athlete. And he embraced it.
His philosophy was simple: “Yeh dil maange more.” The transition soon began producing results. He won silver at the 2023 Asian Games and silver at the 2025 Asian Athletics Championships. In 2026, he became the first Indian decathlete to cross the 8,000-point barrier, setting a national record of 8,057 points.
A severe knee injury forced him to withdraw from the individual high jump competition. But Tejaswin still had the decathlon. Despite the injury, he decided to take on all ten events. For two days, his knee had to endure sprinting, jumping, throwing and running. Every event demanded something different from a body that was already hurting.
When the final event the 1,500 metres was over, Tejaswin Shankar had done something no Indian had ever done before. He had won Commonwealth Games bronze in the decathlon, scoring 7,976 points. The medal made him the first Indian athlete to win Commonwealth Games medals in two different athletics events high jump and decathlon.
His father did not live to see the Commonwealth medal in Glasgow.
But the decision he eventually made for his son to let him chase athletics became part of the story behind it.
Years later, after changing events, changing countries, overcoming disappointment and competing through injury, he found himself standing on a Commonwealth podium again.
This time, not just as a high jumper, but as a complete athlete. And perhaps that is what Tejaswin Shankar’s story is really about: sometimes the biggest leap an athlete takes isn’t over a bar. It is the leap of faith to choose the life he truly wants.
