Centenarian marathon runner Fauja Singh.
Vincent Yu/AP
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Vincent Yu/AP
In London within the winter of 1999, working coach Harmandar Singh took on a brand new scholar who was older than his father.
Fauja Singh was 89, skinny as a reed, and had a scraggy beard that almost reached his chest. For his or her first marathon coaching session that November morning, he had turned up in a three-piece swimsuit.
“I type of needed to inform him that if he was working down the street carrying a three-piece swimsuit, there’s a chance that the police will say, what are you working from?” says Harmandar.
It turned out that the Sikh farmer from the Indian state of Punjab who had lately moved to be with one in all his sons within the London borough of Ilford, was working from his previous.
“He had misplaced his daughter, spouse, and a youthful son in fast succession within the earlier years,” says Harmandar.” His household was involved he would fall into despair.”
The coach knew the way it felt. He too had misplaced somebody a number of months earlier than: his father.
For the following 14 years, Harmandar says, Fauja Singh was the very best scholar he had. Fauja’s years at his sprawling rice and sugarcane fields of rural Jalandhar had made him robust. Folklore had it that he labored, even when his bulls had been drained.
Fauja skilled often, trusted his coach totally, and could not inform a mile from a kilometer. “I used that to my benefit,” says Harmandar. “When there have been a number of miles left, I used to inform him they had been kilometers.”
From the yr 2000, Singh accomplished 9 full marathons and several other shorter ones. He travelled the world, from Hong Kong to New York, typically plodding the monitor in his shiny yellow turban. On the 2003 Toronto Waterfront Marathon, he clocked his private finest of 5 hours and forty minutes. Eight years later on the identical occasion, he became the oldest individual to complete a marathon. In doing so, he beat greater than a hundred a lot youthful runners within the 26.2 mile occasion.
Fauja was 100 years outdated then, based on his passport. But, he by no means made the document books – as a result of he did not have a start certificates to show his age. Few in British-ruled colonial India within the twentieth century had one.
Centenarian marathon runner Fauja Singh, then aged 101, heart, runs in a 10-kilometer race, held as a part of the annual Hong Kong Marathon, in Hong Kong in 2013.
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Kin Cheung/AP
The media beloved Fauja anyway. He not often refused interviews, typically along with his coach or a member of the family translating from Punjabi. Sports activities model Adidas featured him of their “Unimaginable is nothing” advert marketing campaign. A kids’s author published a ebook on him. A bureaucrat-turned-author penned a biography of the “Turbaned Twister.”
Again at his household house in India — a three-storied farmhouse in Beas Pind village, Punjab — medals, trophies and certificates piled up. Fauja’s household proudly displayed them on cabinets and picket cupboards, turning their front room right into a sporting hall-of-fame.
Fauja retired from marathons in 2013, and moved again to India round 2022. Locals typically invited him to sporting occasions. “He’d go as a visitor however inform the organizers, I additionally need a medal,” his granddaughter Japneet Kaur recalled. “At house, he’d climb the sofa and grasp it by a nail.”
On the afternoon of 14 July 2025, Fauja had stepped out to examine on his rice fields within the neighboring village when he was hit by an SUV. He lay in a heap on the busy freeway for a number of minutes till Balbir Singh, a pal of his son’s who was passing by, seen him. “The medical doctors stated he may’ve been saved if we would reached sooner,” stated Balbir. “However he’d misplaced an excessive amount of blood.”
His loss of life at age 114 made headlines all over the world. India’s prime minister said the information pained him. His London working membership said they’d construct a Fauja Singh Clubhouse on his coaching route. A gaggle of Indian sculptors started carving a life-size statue of him.
But it surely additionally put a highlight on India’s lethal roads the place greater than 150,000 persons are killed in accidents yearly. Final yr, India’s freeway minister Nitin Gadkari admitted in Parliament that the loss of life toll retains rising yearly. “Once I go to attend worldwide conferences the place there’s a dialogue on street accidents, I attempt to conceal my face,” he stated.
Japneet Kaur, Fauja Singh’s granddaughter and an aspiring marathon runner, sits in entrance of his many awards.
Omkar Khandekar/NPR
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Omkar Khandekar/NPR
Police arrested a 26-year-old man from a neighboring Dasupur village for the hit-and-run. Amrit Singh Dhillon had tried his finest to keep away from detention after the collision, native media quoted the police saying. He took his automobile off-road to flee CCTV cameras, coated it in his storage, switched to a motorbike “and was casually going round.”
The alacrity of the police motion stunned Fauja’s household. “Hit-and-runs occur as a result of culprits suppose they’ll get away,” Fauja’s nephew Parmeet Singh stated. “If police at all times acted promptly, individuals wouldn’t be as careless on the roads.”
Amrit Singh Dhillon’s aunt, too, didn’t appear to count on the arrest. When NPR visited her residence in Dasupur village, she was unwilling to be interviewed or share her title. However she did say this: “The media picked up the problem as a result of he [Fauja] was a celeb. In any other case, accidents occur on a regular basis.”
Why are India’s roads so harmful?
Native site visitors police chief Manjit Singh has a principle: “The youth as we speak watch overseas movies and attempt to imitate the stunts.” However the pedestrians, he says, aren’t any higher.
Fauja Singh was killed on a busy freeway. His granddaughter Japneet says, he often crossed the site visitors median to get to his fields within the village on the opposite aspect. Many individuals within the two villages do the identical; the closest pedestrian crossing is greater than half a mile away. On the day NPR visited the place, we noticed a father leaping the median with two youngsters on his bike.
“The mentality of Indian pedestrians is, let’s take a shortcut,” says officer Manjit Singh.
However Rohit Baluja, director of the Indian Institute of Street Site visitors Training, says there’s a purpose individuals take such dangers.
Street building has boomed below the decade-long rule of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. Many of those roads, Baluja says, reduce throughout cities and villages however lack warning indicators or pedestrian underpasses. When there’s an accident, he says, authorities often blame the drivers or pedestrians. “Not even a single engineer or a street authority is booked for failures.”
Baluja’s institute conducts analysis and coaching in site visitors administration. “After we examine accidents, and we have achieved round 8,000 such circumstances, we discover that just about 30-33% are due to failures of the street and site visitors engineering.”
He factors to the place the place Fauja Singh died: “There are strategy roads to 2 villages reverse one another. However there aren’t any rumble strips on the freeway within the center, no signal saying there’s an upcoming junction. We construct roads for the automobiles. We don’t take into account the susceptible street customers.”
Fauja Singh’s physique hadn’t failed him until his final day. He took no medicines, ate thrice a day, and gorged on the mangoes that grew in his yard. Age had stooped his again and shrunk him to his bones. He nonetheless walked in every single place, typically and not using a strolling stick.
Fauja had no formal schooling. Days earlier than he died, his granddaughter was instructing him the English alphabet. In flip, Fauja taught her – an aspiring marathoner – methods of his commerce. “Solely the opposite day he was displaying me tips on how to do a warm-up,” Japneet, 16, recollects. “I informed him that he ought to be our PE instructor.”
If not for the accident, his biographer Khushwant Singh says Fauja Singh may need lived on for a few years. “I would as soon as requested him if he was afraid of dying,” he recollects.
“Fauja stated, ‘I am afraid. As a result of now, I’m totally dwelling my life.'”