Few people had their eye on Lokesh Sathyanathan when he first arrived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to take part in the men’s long jump competition at the NCAA Indoor Championships in March. The 26-year-old wasn’t expecting them to. The NCAA Indoor Championships are the highest level of competition in the indoor track and field calendar — considered the most prestigious form of collegiate sport in the world.

The standard of competition is nothing less than that of a world-level meet. Lokesh, competing for Tarleton State University — a relatively small college that had never won an individual track and field title at this competition — was, to put it mildly, not a favourite.

“One day before the competition, the only people who recognised me were the ones who already knew me — probably just my coach and teammates,” he recalls.

That’s not the case any longer. On March 13, Lokesh leapt a career-best 8.21m to win gold. The jump set a new Indian indoor national record and moved him to third on the all-time list of Indian long jumpers across all competitions. It also made him only the fourth Indian to win gold at the NCAA Championships — joining triple jumper M.S. Gill, discus thrower Vikas Gowda, and decathlete and high jumper Tejaswin Shankar.

Lokesh is unrecognised no more.

“The NCAA level is nothing short of the Olympic level. You are competing with Olympic champions, World Record holders, National Record holders of different countries, world medallists. To win gold at this level is special. After the competition, I’ve done multiple interviews, but even regular people want to speak to me. Wherever you walk, people know who you are. They compliment and congratulate you. There are people who follow you on social media. People are watching my jumps. They just want to start a conversation. It’s completely different from the day before your race to the day after,” he says.

Every conversation goes the same way. “People want to know where I’m from. They want to know how it feels to be an NCAA champion. They want to know how I motivate and hype myself and how I go for bigger jumps,” he says.

Motivation, Lokesh says, is easy. He thinks about the hard work his parents put in to start his journey in collegiate sport in the USA. He can’t help but think about how close a freak injury, a couple of years ago, came to ending that journey, and how hard he had to work just to get another chance to compete at this level. “When I’m jumping, I always think of where I came from. Before every competition, I look back at the challenges I’ve faced in my life and think about how lucky I am to get an opportunity to show my talent once again,” he says.

Journey begins

The idea of competing in the collegiate system first came to Lokesh about eight years ago. Back in 2018, he was considered one of India’s most promising junior long jumpers, with a personal best of 7.74m that had won him gold at the Junior South Asian Championships in Colombo, Sri Lanka. After competing at the U-20 World Championships in Tampere, Finland, he attracted the attention of several coaches scouting for track and field programmes in the USA.

Born and raised in Bengaluru in a sports-mad family — his father John played football for the Bengaluru Police while his sister Monica was a national-level 400-metre runner — Lokesh wasn’t certain whether he wanted to leave familiar surroundings. Any plans to shift base were further pushed back after he suffered a serious road accident while travelling to a training session.

The physical and mental toll caused him to pull out of the qualifiers for the 2019 World Championships in Doha. “I would have panic attacks. I would stay by myself in a room, and eventually, my friends didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even sleep. It was just me and my parents at that time. I had a lot of mental health issues that I was dealing with. I was on a lot of anxiety medication as a result,” he recalls.

After he recovered, others nudged him to consider college offers from the USA once again. He was still uncertain. “At that time, I felt if I did go, I’d just be seen as an average athlete who hadn’t accomplished anything. I didn’t think I was good enough,” he says.

As time passed, Lokesh’s enthusiasm to train abroad waned, even as he continued to improve. He won gold at the South Asian Games in Kathmandu and recorded a personal best of 7.93m at the selection trials for the World University Games in early 2021.

At 35, Bobby Carter (left) is one of the youngest head coaches in Division I — the highest level of the NCAA system. He grew up in a family of high-level athletes, with his cousin Michelle Carter having won Olympic gold in shot put in 2016. In Lokesh (right), he saw something special — not just his build and physicality, but also the mindset. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

It was only rekindled in the most painful of circumstances during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. When Lokesh’s mother fell ill, the family didn’t worry at first — until her condition deteriorated suddenly. With doctors preparing the family for the inevitable, Lokesh was permitted to visit her.

“When she was in the last stages of her life, she held my hand, kissed it, and started crying. She just said I had to make the most of whatever opportunity I had. That was the last thing she spoke to me,” he says.

Until then, Mary had never tried to influence her son in any way. “In my entire athletic career, she had been nothing but supportive. She was my biggest motivation. If I had a bad day or if I lost, she would tell me she was there for me, and then she would cook my favourite food so that I would feel better. When I lost her, it was as if I lost everything,” he says.

The shock sent him into a cycle of despair once again. “I was unable to come out of my room. I wasn’t meeting any of my friends. I was once again taking medication for my mental health issues,” he says.

But a conversation with his father changed things. “He told me how, without any warning, my mom was no longer with me. You never know when we won’t have time to fulfil our desires. Whatever time and opportunity we get, we have to grab it and work for what we want. I had to get up, start crawling, run, and move. I can’t be still in one place,” he says.

Two months after his mother passed away, Lokesh once again started applying to colleges in the USA. “I was essentially just sending cold emails to whoever I could. I asked coaches and athletes I had met to recommend me to others. I became very serious about it. I’d stay up late so I could reply to emails immediately,” he says.

As it turned out, coaches were still interested. Eventually, he was offered a full scholarship by the University of New Mexico.

Struggles and second chances

At first, the move seemed to work out for him. In May 2023, Lokesh made his first jump over 8m — with a leap of 8.02m at the Mountain West Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Clovis. In his first year in the collegiate circuit, he even made it to the NCAA outdoor track and field finals.

Later that year, when his coach moved to the University of Louisville, Lokesh followed. He had built a base for his collegiate career. Now it was time for him to take off.

That didn’t happen.

Lokesh says he was taking part in an off-season gym session when a teammate dropped a weight on his right toe, fracturing it. “It came at the worst possible time. I was about six months away from the Olympic selection trials in India. I was really confident I would do well, but I ended up having to get surgery instead,” he recalls.

Things only got worse. One month after surgery, as he began rehabilitation, Lokesh realised something was very wrong. “One of the screws the doctors had placed inside my bone popped out the other side and started piercing through the flesh and bleeding,” he says.

His coaches didn’t take his concern seriously. “They felt it was an infection and I could treat it with antibiotics. Of course, it didn’t work. It only got worse. For 14 days, I couldn’t sleep because of the pain, but all the while people kept telling me these things were normal,” he recalls.

Eventually, Lokesh says he could take it no more. He left his college and flew back to India for a second opinion — and got one just in time. “The doctor told me I needed surgery immediately because the infection was about to reach the bone. They had to take out the screw. It was a very critical situation,” he says.

As he began rehabilitation in India, Lokesh wondered how he can return to jumping. “I never thought I would give up athletics because of what it meant to my parents and what my mother had told me before she passed away. But I was also uncertain about going back to the USA because of the experience I had there. I reached out to every possible person in India who I thought could help me — the state government, private institutes, even different states. I told them I just needed some support. But all I heard was ‘we can’t help you’. Everyone said they’d help only if I started jumping again,” he recalls.

Finally, Lokesh realised he had to give college in the USA another try. “I didn’t have any support in India, and at least in the USA I’d have support to continue my academics and training. In the collegiate system, at least my training would be taken care of by my school. That’s when I reached out to coach Bobby Carter and that’s when things started falling into place,” he says.

A 7.92m jump early in the 2025 season qualified Lokesh for his first NCAA indoor championships. Later, he jumped a personal best of 8.14m at the Michael Johnson Invitational, which qualified him for the NCAA outdoor final, where he finished fifth. It was the high point of a solid, if not spectacular, comeback season. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Before joining the University of New Mexico, Lokesh had got to know Carter while exploring different schools. The two had stayed in touch, and in 2024 Lokesh reached out again after Carter had taken over the track and field programme at Tarleton University. “I was a little nervous because I hadn’t competed for a year, but coach Carter simply said, ‘I’d love to have you over,’” he says.

At 35, Carter is one of the youngest head coaches in Division I — the highest level of the NCAA system. He grew up in a family of high-level athletes, with his cousin Michelle Carter having won Olympic gold in shot put in 2016. In Lokesh, he saw something special — not just his build and physicality, but also the mindset.

“I saw in his eyes all the things he had been through. But I also saw someone who didn’t want to give up. You can’t help but want to go out to bat for someone like that. From an athletics standpoint, I could tell he had the qualities of an athlete. But I could also tell this was a kid with a dream who just needed some help along the way. In my first conversation with him, he said, ‘Coach, I want to be the best.’ That’s all I needed. I took that and ran with it,” Carter says.

Lokesh is grateful for the support he got. “I consider myself really lucky that I could connect with coach Carter. He’s one of my biggest supporters. He’s my cheerleader, mentor, coach, best friend, and a father figure rolled into one. He never made me feel like a stranger or incapable. He always believed in me and told me I can achieve anything,” he says.

Although Tarleton didn’t have a particularly renowned track and field programme unlike the colleges Lokesh had previously trained at, he says the move suited him. “It’s a smaller school, about two hours from Dallas. But that was fine. There are fewer distractions. There’s nothing much to do but train. It has a track, it has a gym. Being smaller meant more focus on me and stronger support systems. It was the perfect place to recover,” he says.

Slowly, things fell into place.

A 7.92m jump early in the 2025 season qualified him for his first NCAA indoor championships. Later, he jumped a personal best of 8.14m at the Michael Johnson Invitational, which qualified him for the NCAA outdoor final, where he finished fifth. It was the high point of a solid, if not spectacular, comeback season.

At the start of 2026, however, Carter sensed that Lokesh was building towards something much more significant. “Early in the season, Lokesh competed in Oklahoma at the JD Martin Invitational. He won with 7.85m, but he also had a foul jump by a very narrow margin that I estimated was at least 8.20m. That gave him confidence that he had a really big jump in him,” says Carter. That would come at the biggest stage possible — at the NCAA Indoor Championships final.

Before the competition, Lokesh wasn’t thinking about his competitors. “I just thanked God that I had another opportunity to compete at this level,” he says.

In second place after three attempts, everything came together in his fourth jump. Running in hard, he hit the board square. Using the double hitch kick, he cycled his legs twice as he took off before landing near the far edge of the pit. The jump put him into the lead, which he never gave up.

When it ended, Lokesh leapt into his coach’s arms. He pointed to the sky in tribute to his mother, whose picture he carries everywhere. When he called his father, who had been following updates from India, both were in tears. “We were both crying but they were happy tears,” he says.

Coach Carter admitted he too was crying when he went home that day. “It was just a really emotional moment,” he says.

Bigger goals

However, despite the magnitude of the win, neither has formally celebrated it. That’s because, as big as becoming NCAA champion feels, both believe Lokesh could have done even more. In his final attempt of the day, Lokesh had made another huge jump of 8.17m. When he came off the sand though he grimaced. “Everything was so good in the take-off that I got overexcited and dropped my hips on landing. It cost me 20–30 cm. It could have been 8.40m,” he says.

Lokesh and Carter now aims for the Indian record currently standing at 8.42m (Jeswin Aldrin). But it won’t be easy. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Carter hopes that the miss acts as a motivation. “Both of us have bigger goals that we want to accomplish. Lokesh’s goal is to jump over 8.50m outdoors,” he says.

With the Indian record currently standing at 8.42m (Jeswin Aldrin), that won’t be easy, but Carter is optimistic. “It’s very possible. He has the ability to be one of the best Indian jumpers of all time. Right now, our challenge is to stay consistent with technique. I know he has the technical ability to get to the 8.50m mark. It’s just about the little things — eating right and competing in the right events,” he says. There are also Lokesh’s own ambitions. “I want to compete on the biggest stages and win a major medal for India at the Commonwealth and Asian Games,” he says.

This, though, won’t be entirely up to him. To represent India, he will have to take part in selection tournaments in the country. That, in turn, means frequent travel between his base at Tarleton and India — adding up to a significant expense. Indeed, even competing in the USA will be challenging in the months to come. Having already competed in university-level competitions in India, he is no longer eligible for outdoor NCAA events and has only one year of eligibility left for indoor competitions. While he can still take part in them as a representative of Tarleton, it will be as an unattached athlete, meaning he would have to cover his own expenses. “So far, I don’t have a sponsor. If I get one, it would make my journey much easier,” he says.

Even so, Lokesh remains undeterred. “I think I’m meant to do something special. I’ve already come such a long way. I’ll keep pushing,” he says.

Published on Apr 08, 2026