Name: Pilavullakandi Thekkeparambil Usha
Born: 27 June 1964, Koothali, Kerala
State: Kerala
Sport: Athletics (sprints and hurdles)
Early life
Usha was born in Koothali, near Perambra in Kerala’s Kozhikode district, and grew up in the nearby town of Payyoli, which gave her the nickname “Payyoli Express”; she is also widely known in India as the “Golden Girl” of Indian athletics. She studied at Providence Women’s College in Kozhikode. In 1976 the Kerala state government had set up a sports division for women athletes at Kannur, and Usha joined it in 1977 as one of forty girls training there. The coach O. M. Nambiar, who spotted her at a school prize-distribution ceremony and judged from her build and her fast walking style that she had the makings of a sprinter, worked with her for the rest of her competitive career. She won six medals at a junior inter-state meet in Kollam in 1978, an early sign of the athlete she would become.
Career
Usha made her Olympic debut at the 1980 Moscow Games, then aged 16, finishing fifth in her 100m heat in 12.27 seconds. At the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi she won two silver medals, in the 100m and 200m. The following year, at the 1983 Asian Championships in Kuwait City, she won her first Asian gold, in the 400m, and finished second in the 200m.
Los Angeles, 1984
Her defining race came at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, where she reached the final of the 400m hurdles – the first Indian woman to reach an Olympic track final. She finished fourth in 55.42 seconds, a Commonwealth record, missing the bronze medal by one hundredth of a second after her run was disrupted by a false start from another competitor. It remains one of the closest near-misses in Indian Olympic history.
Asian dominance
Usha went on to dominate Asian athletics through the mid-1980s. At the 1985 Asian Championships in Jakarta she won five gold medals – in the 100m, 200m, 400m, 400m hurdles and 4x400m relay – a haul that has rarely been matched. At the 1986 Seoul Asian Games she added four more golds and a silver, and she remained competitive into the 1990s, taking further medals at the 1990 Beijing and 1994 Hiroshima Asian Games. Her personal bests included 11.39 seconds for the 100m (Jakarta, 1985), 51.61 seconds for the 400m (Canberra, 1985) and 55.42 seconds for the 400m hurdles (Los Angeles, 1984); she later ran 23.05 seconds for the 200m in Lucknow in 1999, well into the later stages of her career. She competed at four Olympic Games in total, from 1980 to 1996, and retired from competition in 2000.
Coaching and later roles
After retiring, Usha founded the Usha School of Athletics in 2002, drawing on the coaching approach she had learned from Nambiar. The school moved to its present campus at Kinalur, near Kozhikode, in 2008, after the Kerala government allocated more than 30 acres of land for it, and has since produced Olympic runners such as Tintu Luka and Jisna Mathew. She later served as Dean of the Department of Physical Education at Kannur University, from 2019 to 2022. In July 2022 she was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, and in December that year she was appointed to the panel of Vice-Chairpersons, the first nominated MP to hold that position. Also in December 2022 she was elected unopposed as president of the Indian Olympic Association, becoming the first woman, and the first former athlete, to hold the post.
Personal life
Usha married V. Srinivasan, an inspector with the Central Industrial Security Force, in 1991; the couple have two sons.
Achievements and awards
Arjuna Award (1984), Padma Shri (1985), IAAF Veteran Pin (2019), and honorary doctorates from Kannur University (2000), IIT Kanpur (2017), the University of Calicut (2018) and the Central University of Kerala (2023).
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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