Harjit Singh Clocks 10.17s to Become Third Fastest Indian in 100m History

There is a village called Majri in Fatehgarh Sahib district of Punjab where a boy spent his school years playing kabaddi with friends, completely unaware that his legs were carrying the kind of speed that most Indian sprinters spend their entire careers chasing, and that boy Harjit Singh is now 28 years old, serving in the Indian Air Force, and sitting third on the all-time list of fastest Indians ever to run the 100 metres.

Harjit ran 10.17 seconds at the Indian Athletics Series-8 in Pune to win the men's 100m race outright, and the timing of that performance made it even harder to ignore because just three days earlier he had posted 10.21 seconds at the Punjab State Senior Athletics Meet in Ludhiana, which means the 28-year-old had his two biggest weeks as a sprinter back to back, travelling between cities, competing on consecutive weekends, and getting faster rather than slower as the days went on. Gurindervir Singh sits at the top of Indian sprint history right now with the national record of 10.09 seconds from Ranchi in May 2026, the first Indian man ever to go under 10.10 seconds, and Manikanta Hoblidhar holds the second spot, and what Harjit has done by running 10.17 seconds is push his name into that same conversation permanently, joining a list that only the very best Indian sprinters across any generation have ever appeared on.

The part of this story that does not get enough attention is that Harjit is doing all of this while serving in the Indian Air Force, training under coach Sarabjit Singh Happy in Jalandhar, and managing a preparation schedule built around military duties rather than a full-time athletics programme, and yet the times keep getting faster and the results keep getting bigger, which says everything about the kind of athlete and person Harjit Singh actually is away from the track. Gurindervir and Harjit have been close for years, long before either name meant anything to the national athletics media, and Harjit has been open about the fact that watching his friend break through every barrier that Indian sprinting had set for itself gave him the belief that those same barriers were never as far away as they seemed, and coach Happy has described the current group of Punjab sprinters as the best generation the country has ever produced in the 100 metres.

Sportscape feels that Harjit Singh running 10.17 seconds from a village in Punjab, through a kabaddi background, while serving in the Air Force and training outside the centralised high-performance system, is the kind of story that Indian athletics needs to tell loudly and often, because it shows the sprint revolution happening in this country right now is not a carefully manufactured product of one programme or one set of resources, it is organic, widespread, and showing up in places nobody thought to look, which means the best is very likely still ahead.