Early Monday morning, a day before his World Championship final, Sarvesh Kushare stood near the high-jump pit of Tokyo’s cavernous National Stadium and video-called his childhood coach, Raosaheb Jadhav. “It was a brief call,” Jadhav said. “He showed me the stadium, the jumping pit… for a moment, we became nostalgic.”
They also marvelled at Kushare’s giant leap in the sport.
The 30-year-old athlete, who had started on makeshift pits made of corn husk, was now rubbing shoulders with the world’s best, including Olympic champion Hamish Kerr at one of the finest sporting arenas. “To think of how we began, with nothing but jugaad and to see him come this far,” the coach said.
Kushare ended the call with a promise: to target a top-five finish in a star-studded field and go for his personal best. On Tuesday, he narrowly missed the first goal but delivered on the second. He recorded a personal best leap of 2.28m to finish joint-sixth, becoming the first high jumper from India to qualify for the World Championship final. Kerr won the gold medal.
India’s Sarvesh Anil Kushare competes in the men’s high jump final at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
As Kushare competed under the bright lights of the 67,000-seater arena, Devargaon village in Nashik with a population of less than 3,000, stopped to watch one of their own land on the biggest stage in athletics — except his father. “I was too nervous,” Anil told The Indian Express. “The rest of our village stops to follow Sarvesh’s performance whenever he is competing, especially at the international events.”
Kushare Sr had wanted his son to become a civil engineer. “But he was adamant to pursue a career in high jump,” Anil said.
There was a catch, though. There was no proper facility to train in their village. That’s when Jadhav, an enterprising school teacher who had introduced Kushare to the sport, teamed up with Anil to prepare a makeshift pit. They used corn husk, agricultural waste, old unused clothes and cotton. Kushare, then 18, would leap over the bar into the makeshift pit.
Story continues below this ad
“We would fill all the corn residue in sacks and stack them together. We would then tie two poles to create the set-up for him,” Anil said. “Last year, when he played at the Olympics, all of us were emotional, knowing how far he has gone from this small village.”
No one from their village had “travelled outside Maharashtra”, Anil joked, adding, “And Sarvesh is travelling all over the world. I always thought he would do well at the national level. I had told him to pursue sports for 10 years but he has been going on and on and it’s been more than 14 years now.”
There are no signs of him slowing down, either. For three years, after he set his previous personal best of 2.27m in 2022, Kushare has been trying to better that mark. On Tuesday, the jumper broke into an impromptu celebration by displaying his muscles to the camera and running towards the crowd to soak in the applause.
6th in the world! 🌍 For me from this point on – you are the GREATEST Indian highjumper ever! Well done sir ! 👏 👏
The NR hunt stays on ….. #Sarveshkushare #indianathletics— Tejaswin Shankar (TJ) (@TejaswinShankar) September 16, 2025
“The celebration is for the fact that he finally got that 0.01m, which he was trying for the past three years,” said Kushare’s current coach Justin Thomas, who trains him at the Army Sports Institute in Pune. “When Sarvesh came to me in 2022, he was jumping 2.25m regularly but we worked on his technique. He has been jumping since he was a kid, so it was not easy to change his technique.”
Thomas made minute changes in stride and approach to the bar. “When he used to run towards the bar, his right hand used to flap more and used to be wide open. First, we changed that… he runs with a more compact shape now,” he said. “After that, we worked on how he approached the bar. Now, he goes aggressively with four strides as compared to his early technique where he was a little slow.”
Story continues below this ad
Kushare has much more left in his tank, Thomas said. “He didn’t win a medal at the World Championships but if you look at it in a way, he is the first one to (reach the final). He would always say that he wanted others to believe that Indians can compete at the World level and today he proved it. I think this is the start of another good phase in his career and he will go on for more,” he said.
The next barrier Kushare will hope to cross is the national record (NR) of 2.29m. That record currently belongs to Tejaswin Shankar, who is now a regular in the decathlon. Shankar, on his part, had no doubt about the enormity of Kushare’s place at the Worlds. He wrote on X: “For me from this point on – you are the GREATEST Indian high-jumper ever! Well done sir! The NR hunt stays on…”
