Feisty Amlan Borgohain eyes relay gold at Asian Athletics

Sometimes a sprint can turn into a marathon – tough, unfriendly, mostly unforgiving. Ask Amlan Borgohain. His race is still on, the finish line seemingly nowhere in sight, but he’s not giving in.There were high hopes from the Assam sprinter when he broke the 200m national record in 2022 and followed it up by running the 100m in 10.25 seconds. Things would only get better from here on, they said.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!But Amlan failed to keep up the good show and endured a mediocre 2023, when his returns remained average. The wake-up call was when he finally finished sixth in the 200m at the Asian Games that October.Who's that IPL player?It was a tough pill to swallow, nothing that a shake-up of pride, and an athlete’s belief in his training couldn’t fix. Those hard yards. But what happened a month later would scar him for life. Amlan’s mother, who has been undergoing dialysis for some months, passed away.Barely was his grieving complete, closure reached at losing his biggest supporter and inspiration, when the following January, he suffered an injury during a practice session. His best timings in 2024 read 21.51 seconds in 200m and 10.46 seconds in 100m — ample evidence of just which misery lane he was running in.But this is 2025, and there’s possibly the home stretch in sight. Finally. The year holds a lot of promise for Amlan as not only has he begun making up for lost ground with promising timings, but he also finds himself part of a collective that is brimming with potential and hope. As part of the 4x100m relay team that broke the national record with 38.69 sec in April’s Indian Open Relay Competition, Amlan may just be finding that the baton change was the transition he needed all along.The quartet of Borgohain, Gurindervir Singh, Animesh Kujur and Manikanta Hoblidhar will now be hoping to repeat their feat at Asian Athletics Championships starting Tuesday (May 27-31) in Gumi, Republic of Korea.“We want to win gold, but it will be very tough because in order to do that we will have to pass the baton perfectly,” Amlan told TOI, during an exclusive interaction ahead of departure to Korea.Speaking for the collective, Amlan’s is not an unrealistic aim considering the South Korean team won bronze in 4x100m relay at the 2023 Asian Games in 38.74 seconds. But as athletics director with Reliance Foundation James Hillier also said, the team will have to perfect the art of passing the baton if they harbour ambitions of finishing on the podium. They have been practicing just that under Hillier’s watchful eye during the camp in Mumbai over the past few weeks. While Hillier has been more than pleased with the quartet’s performance, he is happiest about how Amlan has made a comeback from his injury.