The Asian Games silver medalist survived a bad phase of chronic injury, restarted at the bottom, and is now adding to her medal tally, all the while aiming to keep her time under 13 seconds
Jyothi Yarraji (24)
Athlete
It started with a letter that Jyothi Yarraji wrote to her elder brother explaining why she wanted to move to Hyderabad to train in athletics. “It was a three-page letter, and I thought he’d be very upset with me,” says the girl from Vizag. “But he started to laugh.” Yarraji’s parents—father a private security guard and mother a domestic help—were not too keen at first, but gave her a year to prove herself. “If I didn’t do well by then, I had to return home, they said.”
(This story appears in the 23 February, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)