Ancy Sojan — Two Centimetres from Gold

India’s long jump record holder led the Asian Games final for five rounds and lost it in the sixth. The silver is her second in a row. The number she came for, seven metres, is still twelve centimetres away.

From ISJ’s Asian Games profile of Ancy Sojan, 29 September 2026. The full profile is at the end of this article.

Ancy Sojan was in front after each of the first five rounds of the women’s long jump final at the Aichi–Nagoya Asian Games on Sunday evening. China’s Huang Yingying needed only the sixth. Huang’s last jump measured 6.55 metres, two centimetres past Ancy’s best of 6.53m, and the gold went with it. Ancy’s own final attempt landed at 6.49m. She finished with silver, as she had at Hangzhou three years ago.

The last round at Mizuho Park cost India twice. Tan Mengyi, also of China, used her final jump to reach 6.46m and take the bronze from Shaili Singh, who had held third place since the fourth round and finished fourth with 6.42m.

The margin is the story of the night. It is not the story of her season. Three months to the day before the final, at the National Inter-State Championships in Bhubaneswar, Ancy jumped 6.88m and took the national record from Anju Bobby George, whose 6.83m had stood since the 2004 Athens Olympics. She came to Nagoya as the holder of the longest jump by an Indian woman. The mark that won her silver was 35 centimetres shorter than that record. It was also, to the centimetre, the distance with which Anju won India’s only Asian Games gold in the event, at Busan in 2002. Those 35 centimetres, between the jumper she was in June and the one who jumped on Sunday, are what she has to close at 25 if the record is to turn into the medal she came for.

Five rounds in front

The final started at 18:55 local time. Ancy opened with 6.49m and the lead. She fouled her second jump, went 6.46m in the third and 6.31m in the fourth, and nobody passed her. Huang, who had opened with 6.14m, reached 6.44m in the second round and equalled Ancy’s 6.49m in the fifth. Ancy stayed in front on countback, her second-best jump of 6.46m against Huang’s 6.44m, and answered in the same round with 6.53m, her best of the night.

She told RevSportz afterwards that the trouble started early. Her trial jump had been “very good”, she said, and she expected the competition to open up for her after the first round. “But after the second and third jumps, I started feeling the stiffness. I was tired and it was difficult with the breathing.” She foam-rolled between attempts. To ANI she described “muscle fatigue, stiffness and numbness”.

Then came the sixth round. “I was watching her jump,” Ancy told RevSportz. “I thought she was behind me. I was a little happy because I felt she hadn’t gone past me. But when the measurement came, it was 6.55.” She said she had been “fully confident” of beating Huang. “But sometimes fate is different.”

The last round. ISJ’s slide carries her account to RevSportz and the strip of her six jumps, with her place after each round.

There is a precedent. At the 2023 Asian Championships in Bangkok she also slipped down the standings late, RevSportz noted: second after two rounds, she was passed in the third and the fifth and finished fourth with 6.41m. “That experience taught me a lot,” she said on Sunday. On the same evening Sarvesh Kushare, who had broken the national high jump record in Bhubaneswar on the same June day as Ancy, also won silver.

The same 6.53

India’s women have now won nine Asian Games long jump medals since the first Games, in New Delhi in 1951. One of them is gold. Anju’s 6.53m at Busan on 7 October 2002 beat Japan’s Maho Hanaoka by six centimetres; in 2026 the same distance was worth silver. Anju added a silver at Doha in 2006, and she and Ancy are the only Indian women with two medals in the event.

Anju’s other number shaped this year. Her 6.83m came in the Olympic final in Athens on 27 August 2004, when Ancy was three. Anju placed sixth that night and was moved up to fifth when Marion Jones, who had jumped 6.85m, was later disqualified. For 21 years and ten months no Indian woman went further. When Ancy did, Anju told RevSportz: “At last, after 22 years, it has happened.” If somebody broke her record, she added, “it should be a clean athlete”, and Ancy had been “so consistent throughout the years”.

Nattika

Ancy Sojan Edappilly was born on 1 March 2001 in Nattika, a coastal village in Thrissur district, the eldest of three children. Her father, Sojan E.T., drives an auto-rickshaw. He was an athlete in his youth, in the jumps and the 100m, and told The Quint in 2020 that he never had the support to go further: “I didn’t want my children to go that way.” Her mother, Jancy, has worked at a Consumerfed Triveni store.

Her first coach was a second auto driver. Sanoj V.V., known in Nattika as Kannan mash, had played cricket against Sojan as a teenager, and Sojan took his daughter to him at the Nattika KM UP School when she was in class seven, the father told Onmanorama in 2020. Kannan took no fixed salary. “I do it (coaching) out of my passion and earn my livelihood by driving auto,” he said. They trained on the Nattika Fisheries School ground, on what he called limited facilities. His verdict when she was 18: “I won’t say Ancy is the most talented athlete I have ever coached. But her devotion is something else.”

Born in Nattika. The family, the ground and Kannan mash, from Onmanorama’s photographs. The slide says he coached her for seven years; that was her count in January 2020, and Reliance Foundation now puts it at nearly a decade.

She came to the pit sideways. Her father wanted a sprinter. She ran the 100m, 200m, 400m and the relays, she told IndiaSportsHub in 2022, and gave up a Bharatanatyam course about halfway through when athletics took over. The long jump arrived as an extra: school meets allowed three events, and a physical education teacher suggested it, O Heraldo reported in July. “I wanted to make her a sprinter, but it was her destiny to represent India in the long jump,” Sojan told the paper.

Sprinter first, jumper after

At the 2014 Kerala sub-junior meet she was fourth in the 100m and the 200m and third in the long jump. By January 2020, at 18, she was winning both. At the Khelo India Youth Games in Guwahati she took the under-21 long jump with 6.36m, a Games record, and a few hours later the 100m in 12.21sec.

Her hamstrings settled the choice. They kept getting injured, she told IndiaSportsHub, and after talking to her coaches and parents she decided to stick to the long jump going into 2022. She had joined the national camp in December 2021. On her 21st birthday, 1 March 2022, she won the first Indian Open Jumps competition in Thiruvananthapuram with 6.51m, a personal best.

The senior medals came slowly, then in a run. In Hangzhou in October 2023 she never led Xiong Shiqi, who won with 6.73m, but went past her own best twice, 6.56m in the third round and 6.63m in the fifth. Silver at the 2025 Asian Championships in Gumi and bronze at the Asian Indoors in Tianjin in February followed, both well short of 6.60m.

The system behind 6.88

She serves in the Indian Navy as a chief petty officer and trains with Reliance Foundation, under Anoop Joseph, with James Hillier as the programme’s head coach. Her own account of what changed is about recovery rather than workload. “Earlier, I used to get injured a lot because I had some physical weaknesses,” she said in a July interview published by the foundation. “Earlier, I was training hard, but recovery resources were very weak.”

This season the marks moved. At the Federation Cup in Ranchi in May she went 6.47m, 6.56m, 6.69m and then 6.75m in the fourth round, a personal best and a meet record, but nine centimetres short of the 6.84m Commonwealth Games standard. In Bhubaneswar on 27 June, at Kalinga Stadium, she opened with 6.73m, far past the 6.48m Asian Games qualifying mark, fouled her second, went 6.67m and 6.72m, then 6.88m in the fifth round and 6.69m in the sixth. “I came here to do my PB, not the national record,” she told PTI. Shaili Singh was second with 6.67m. ISJ’s June recap reported that Ancy and M. Sreeshankar were named the athletes of the meet.

The crown. The record she broke and the six jumps that broke it. The slide gives a wind reading of +0.7m/s, which ISJ could not find in any published result, and the 22 years is the rounded figure: the record stood 21 years and ten months.

“I was underrated, but now people know who I am,” she told O Heraldo in July. Anju had been the standard for so long that the event, in her own words to RevSportz, had stood still: “Every other event was improving and my event was standing at the same place.”

The next number

Twelve centimetres separate the national record from seven metres, a line no Indian woman has crossed. Ancy has been saying so out loud for years. At 21 she told IndiaSportsHub she wanted to be “the 1st Indian woman to breach 7:00m”. Three weeks before Nagoya she put it to Olympics.com, in an interview carried by IANS: “Either seven metres or a gold medal – this is what I want.”

Sunday gave her neither, and the arithmetic of the two evenings shows how far apart they were. Her five legal jumps in Bhubaneswar averaged 6.74m. Her five in Nagoya averaged 6.46m, 28 centimetres less, and her best there was shorter than every legal jump she took in Bhubaneswar. She told Onmanorama she had competed in more than ten events this season and that her performances had been consistent. She told ANI she was tired. Both can be true: the record came at the end of June, the final at the end of September.

The next number. The target, 7.00m, twelve centimetres beyond the record, beside her line to RevSportz on bouncing back.

“This isn’t the end; we’re just getting started,” she told Onmanorama after the final. She has the national record, two Asian Games silvers and a target she was already naming at 21. In Nagoya she finished two centimetres from one of the two things she said she wanted. The other is twelve centimetres away.

The profile

Ancy Sojan — 10 slides, 29 September 2026

ISJ’s Asian Games profile, as published. Swipe or scroll sideways.

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Shown as published. Where the slides and this article differ, the article reflects ISJ’s recheck; every correction is listed in the notes above.