Centenarian marathon runner Fauja Singh.
Vincent Yu/AP
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Vincent Yu/AP
In London within the winter of 1999, operating coach Harmandar Singh took on a brand new pupil 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 sort of had to tell him that if he was running down the road wearing a three-piece suit, there is a possibility that the police will say, what are you running 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 every of his sons within the London borough of Ilford, was operating from his previous.
“He had lost his daughter, wife, and a younger son in quick succession in the previous years,” says Harmandar.” His family was concerned he would fall into depression.”
The coach knew the way it felt. He too had misplaced somebody a number of months earlier than: his father.
For the subsequent 14 years, Harmandar says, Fauja Singh was one of the best pupil he had. Fauja’s years at his sprawling rice and sugarcane fields of rural Jalandhar had made him powerful. Folklore had it that he labored, even when his bulls have been drained.
Fauja educated often, trusted his coach absolutely, and could not inform a mile from a kilometer. “I used that to my advantage,” says Harmandar. “When there were several miles left, I used to tell him they were 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, usually plodding the observe in his vibrant yellow turban. On the 2003 Toronto Waterfront Marathon, he clocked his private greatest of 5 hours and forty minutes. Eight years later on the similar occasion, he grew to become the oldest particular person 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 previous then, in line with 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, middle, 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 cherished Fauja anyway. He not often refused interviews, usually along with his coach or a member of the family translating from Punjabi. Sports activities model Adidas featured him of their “Impossible is nothing” advert marketing campaign. A kids’s author revealed a ebook on him. A bureaucrat-turned-author penned a biography of the “Turbaned Tornado.”
Again at his household dwelling 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 wood cupboards, turning their lounge right into a sporting hall-of-fame.
Fauja retired from marathons in 2013, and moved again to India round 2022. Locals usually invited him to sporting occasions. “He’d go as a guest but tell the organizers, I also want a medal,” his granddaughter Japneet Kaur recalled. “At home, he’d climb the couch and hang it by a nail.”
On the afternoon of 14 July 2025, Fuaja had stepped out to verify on his rice fields within the neighboring village when he was hit by an SUV. Fauja lay in a heap on the busy freeway for a number of minutes till Balbir Singh, a good friend of his son’s who was passing by, observed him. “The doctors said he could’ve been saved if we’d reached sooner,” stated Balbir. “But he’d lost too much blood.”
His loss of life at age 114 made headlines world wide. India’s prime minister stated the information pained him. His London operating membership stated they might construct a Fauja Singh Clubhouse on his coaching route. A gaggle of Indian sculptors began carving a life-size statue of him.
However it 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. “When I go to attend international conferences where there is a discussion on road accidents, I try to hide 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 greatest to keep away from detention after the collision, native media quoted the police saying. He took his automotive off-road to flee CCTV cameras, coated it in his storage, switched to a motorbike “and was casually going around.”
The alacrity of the police motion stunned Fauja’s household. “Hit-and-runs happen because culprits think they can get away,” Fauja’s nephew Parmeet Singh stated. “If police always acted promptly, people would not 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 identify. However she did say this: “The media picked up the issue because he [Fauja] was a celebrity. Otherwise, accidents happen all the time.”
Why are India’s roads so harmful?
Native site visitors police chief Manjit Singh has a concept: “The youth today watch foreign films and try 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 normally 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 Highway Site visitors Schooling, says there’s a cause individuals take such dangers.
Highway building has boomed underneath 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 normally blame the drivers or pedestrians. “Not even a single engineer or a road authority is booked for failures.”
Baluja’s institute conducts analysis and coaching in site visitors administration. “When we investigate accidents, and we’ve done around 8,000 such cases, we find that almost 30-33% are because of failures of the road and traffic engineering.”
He factors to the place the place Fauja Singh died: “There are approach roads to two villages opposite each other. But there are no rumble strips on the highway in the middle, no sign saying there’s an upcoming junction. We build roads for the vehicles. We do not consider the vulnerable road users.”
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, usually and not using a strolling stick.
Fauja had no formal training. Days earlier than he died, his granddaughter was educating him the English alphabet. In flip, Fauja taught her – an aspiring marathoner – tips of his commerce. “Only the other day he was showing me how to do a warm-up,” Japneet, 16, remembers. “I told him that he should be our PE teacher.”
If not for the accident, his biographer Khushwant Singh says Fauja Singh may need lived on for a few years. “I’d once asked him if he was afraid of dying,” he remembers.
“Fauja said, ‘I am afraid. Because now, I am fully living my life.'”
