I have stopped following the herd now, I try to lead them: Avinash Sable

One chat with the Beed runner assures that his silver in the 3000m steeplechase event at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games was no fluke. As one listens to him speak, he comes across as a solid prospect for the 2024 Paris Olympics. An army runner, Sable reckons he is a changed man post his experience at the Tokyo Olympics.

Sable, who returned to the Army Sports Institute, where he is training for the Diamond League, remains unperturbed with the hype that surrounds him. He stays humble about most of his achievements, including breaking the National record nine times. “I never felt breaching NR is an achievement.

My aim is to take the timing as low as I can. I want to take it to the sub-8 minute. The aim is to take the timing to a level where the upcoming athletes feel motivated to breach that and at the same time believe that if I can achieve it, they can do it too,” Sable, 27, told TOI.

Sable was noticed first when he broke Gopal Saini’s 37-year-old record in 2018. However, he feels his records shouldn’t take this long to break. “The faster the records break, the better it is for the growth of the event.

If records set by me take another 30 years to break, we will go 30 years behind the world. When I took up this sport, I had a target of 8.29s. The coming batch will now have the target of running 8.05s or maybe 8mins and it is achievable.” Sable feels training abroad has changed his perspective and has helped him get rid of the complexes that Indian athletes normally have.

“I always thought athletes from other countries have something special that we lack. I thought their training and diet was better than ours, but my perception changed when I went to the US to train with them. I realized that they do similar things, eat