The Medal Was Never in Doubt. The Colour Was.

Kiran Pahal, M.R. Poovamma, Prachi Choudhary and Vithya Ramraj won the women’s 4x400m relay in 3:29.69, 0.52 seconds clear of Salwa Eid Naser’s Bahrain. It is India’s first athletics gold in Nagoya, and the title Bahrain took from them in Hangzhou is back.

From ISJ’s Asian Games profile of India’s women’s 4x400m relay team, 29 September 2026. The full profile is at the end of this article.

India’s women won the 4x400m relay at the Asian Games in Nagoya on Tuesday in 3 minutes 29.69 seconds. Kiran Pahal ran the first leg, M.R. Poovamma the second and Prachi Choudhary the third, and Vithya Ramraj brought the baton home 0.52 seconds ahead of Bahrain, whose last runner was Salwa Eid Naser, the Asian record holder at 400m. China were third in 3:31.02, Japan fourth in 3:31.44.

It is India’s first gold in athletics at these Games and its sixth overall, the second of the day after Neeru Dhanda’s in the women’s trap. Until the relay, as National Herald’s report of the race noted, the track and field team had been in danger of leaving an Asian Games without an athletics gold for the first time since Hiroshima in 1994. The same evening the men’s 4x400m team, the defending champions, took bronze in 3:01.61 behind Japan and Qatar.

No event in Indian athletics is more dependable than this one. India have won a medal in the women’s 4x400m at every Asian Games since 1982, twelve in a row, and Tuesday’s was the seventh gold. But dependable had stopped meaning gold. A run of five straight titles ended in Hangzhou in 2023, where Bahrain, with Naser on the last leg, beat India by 0.20 seconds in a Games record. In Nagoya the podium was close to a given; the step was not. It was settled by four runners who each arrived with a race already in their legs or a gap in their careers: a lead-off on her fourth race in six days, a 36-year-old back from a doping ban, a third-leg runner three days after her first individual Asian Games medal, and an anchor who had broken P.T. Usha’s 42-year-old national record the day before.

Half a second, leg by leg

Some of the race is settled. Pahal started India from lane six and handed over in third; every report that gives her position agrees on that. Ramraj made the decisive move in the second half of the anchor leg (around the 200m mark in Sportstar, Morung Express and NewsBytes, in the final 200m in ThePrint) and India finished 0.52 seconds clear. What happened in between depends on which account you read.

PTI’s report, carried by National Herald, has Poovamma taking India into the lead on the second leg and Choudhary keeping them there. Sportstar’s Jonathan Selvaraj, reporting from the stadium, has it differently: Poovamma, fourth when the lanes merged, passed Japan and Bahrain to hand over with only China ahead; Choudhary held second behind China’s Zhou Li and saw off a charge from Bahrain’s Zainab Fyofuoba, who faded; and Naser took Bahrain’s baton in last place, a little over five seconds after Ramraj had hers. ThePrint, Hindustan Times and Morung Express also have Ramraj setting off behind the leader, China’s Zuo Siyu, which sits more easily with Sportstar’s version than with a front-running one. ISJ found no published splits that settle it.

Ramraj’s own account points the same way. “I was a bit confused around the 300m mark,” she told ThePrint. “Do I overtake her now, or do I wait and keep chasing her?” She went. Naser came through to second and cut into India’s lead, but not by enough. Ramraj had been given the leg on trust, she said: “They have trusted me as the anchor runner. I had to live up to it, right?”

ISJ slide 5: after the line, four PTI frames of the quartet with the flag on a wet Nagoya track.

Naser, for the third time

Naser is the reason Bahrain arrive at every Asian Games final in this event as the team to beat. Born in Nigeria and running for Bahrain since 2014, she won the 2019 world title in 48.14, still the Asian record, and took Olympic silver in Paris in 2024. In Nagoya she won the individual 400m on Saturday in 49.20, a Games record, by 3.18 seconds. Two days before that she anchored Bahrain’s mixed 4x400m team to gold in an Asian Games record of 3:12.87, with Ramraj anchoring India to silver in 3:14.46.

Tuesday was her third women’s relay final against India, and all three have turned on the woman asked to deal with her. In Jakarta in 2018 India’s coach, Galina Bukharina, gave the anchor to V.K. Vismaya, 21 and running her first international race, rather than to Hima Das. “Hima wanted to run the anchor. But I said no,” Bukharina told ESPN. Vismaya held Naser off and India won by 1.89 seconds. In Hangzhou in 2023 it went the other way: Bahrain 3:27.65, a Games record, India 3:27.85 with Subha Venkatesan on the last leg. The record Bahrain broke was India’s own 3:28.68 from Incheon, which had stood for nine years.

Twelve Games, twelve medals

The women’s 4x400m has been on the Asian Games programme since 1974, and India did not reach the podium in its first two editions. The streak began in New Delhi in 1982 with a silver behind Japan, run by Rita Sen, Hamida Banu, M.D. Valsamma and Padmini Thomas. Four years later in Seoul, Valsamma, Vandana Rao, Shiny Abraham and P.T. Usha won the first gold, in a Games record 3:34.58. It was one of Usha’s four golds at those Games, with the 200m, the 400m and the 400m hurdles.

Then came a long stretch in second place. China won in 1990, 1994 and 1998, the last of them by 0.17 seconds in Bangkok. Usha ran three of India’s twelve medal-winning finals: 1986, 1990 and 1994. From Busan in 2002 to Jakarta in 2018 India won five in a row, three of them with Manjeet Kaur (2002, 2006, 2010), and the 2010 and 2014 teams each lowered the Games record, to 3:29.02 and then 3:28.68. India’s fastest time in an Asian Games final remains the Hangzhou silver, 3:27.85.

Poovamma’s gold on Tuesday was her third in the event, after Incheon 2014 and Jakarta 2018, twelve years after the first. It equals Manjeet Kaur’s three, the most by any Indian in these finals.

The lead-off and the one who was there in 2014

Pahal is 26, from Sonipat district in Haryana, and a clerk with Indian Railways. She took up athletics around Class 10 without the money for running shoes or a kit, The Bridge reported in 2022, and her father, Om Prakash, a clerk at the tehsil court, backed her when neighbours told him girls should not play sport. He died in May 2022 after a long lung illness. A month later she won the 400m at the National Inter-State Championships in 52.47. “He was the one behind my taking up to athletics, but he is no more,” she said then. Hima Das, whose 50.79 from 2018 is still the national record, looked out for her when they were in camp together; “she used to give me jerseys and shoes,” Pahal told The Bridge in 2024.

In June 2024, at the Inter-State Championships in Panchkula, she ran 50.92, inside the Olympic standard of 50.95, and went to Paris. In Nagoya she was the busiest of the four. On Thursday she anchored India’s mixed relay heat to second place in 3:16.23, which earned her a share of the silver. She ran the 400m heats on Friday and finished fifth in Saturday’s final in 53.41, in the rain. On Tuesday she ran the opening leg of the relay: four races in six days.

ISJ slide 8: Kiran Pahal, leg one, with her Nagoya ledger; ISJ found no report confirming the 53.44 heat time the slide gives.

Poovamma was the only one of the four who had won this title before, and she had won it twice. Born on 5 June 1990 in Gonikoppal, in Karnataka’s Kodagu district, and schooled in Mangaluru, she runs for ONGC. At Incheon in 2014 she won the individual 400m bronze in 52.36 and anchored the relay to its Games record; the Arjuna Award followed in 2015. In Jakarta in 2018 she ran the second leg of the relay gold and was part of the mixed 4x400m team that finished second to Bahrain, a silver upgraded to gold in July 2020 after Bahrain were disqualified over Kemi Adekoya’s doping ban. She ran the relay at the Rio and Paris Olympics.

Then came the gap. At the Indian Grand Prix in Patiala on 18 February 2021 she tested positive for methylhexaneamine, a stimulant on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited list. NADA’s disciplinary panel gave her three months in June 2022; NADA appealed, and that September the appeal panel made it two years and annulled her results from the date of the test, Olympics.com reported. She was not in Hangzhou. She came back in late July 2023, running the Sri Lankan national championships in Colombo as an unattached athlete. In Nagoya, at 36, she ran the mixed relay heat and final on Thursday, for another silver, and the second leg on Tuesday. By ISJ’s count from the results, that is six Asian Games medals, four of them gold.

ISJ slide 9: M.R. Poovamma under the flag; the slide gives 51.73 for her Incheon bronze, which she won in 52.36 (51.73 is her personal best, also from 2014).

The third leg and the anchor

Choudhary, 29, from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, had spent her senior career as a relay runner: silver in the 4x400m at the 2019 Asian Championships in Doha, silver in Hangzhou, a place in India’s relay squad for Paris. On Saturday, in the rain, she won the individual 400m bronze in 53.21, behind Naser and Iran’s Zahra Zarei Manoujan (52.38), having gone into the final with only the sixth-fastest personal best in the field, according to Outlook. Pahal was fifth. It was the first individual Asian Games 400m medal by an Indian woman since Hima Das’s silver in 2018, and she said it mattered “because people kept on telling me that I can win medals only in relays.” Three days later she ran the third leg.

ISJ slide 10: Prachi Choudhary and the line behind her 400m bronze; the slide trims her quote, and its heat time and personal best could not be confirmed.

Ramraj is the subject of her own ISJ profile, so briefly: she was born in Coimbatore on 20 September 1998, a tempo driver’s daughter and an identical twin (her sister Nithya is also an athlete), and the twins went to a sports hostel in Erode from Class 7. She runs for Indian Railways and has trained under Nehpal Singh Rathore in Chennai since 2021. In Hangzhou she equalled Usha’s 400m hurdles record of 55.42, set at the 1984 Olympics. On Monday in Nagoya she broke it, running 54.75 for bronze behind the UAE’s Mariam Kareem, who won in a Games record 54.31, and Kazakhstan’s Adelina Zems. Tuesday was her fourth race in six days and her third medal of the Games. “This gold is my third medal here,” she said in remarks released through the Inspire Institute of Sport.

ISJ slide 11: Vithya Ramraj, the anchor, with the 54.75 that took Usha’s record and her four races in Nagoya.

Twelve, and the next one

All four leave Nagoya with at least two medals. The title is India’s again, but the clock says how much further there is to go outside Asia. Bahrain’s 3:27.65 from Hangzhou is still the Games record, and in Paris two years ago an Indian quartet with Ramraj and Poovamma ran 3:32.51 and went out in the heats.

The streak itself has never depended on the same four women. It has run through Valsamma and Usha, through Manjeet Kaur, through Poovamma, and now through a lead-off from Sonipat and a hurdler from Coimbatore. The next Asian Games are in Doha in 2030. Poovamma will be 40. Naser will be 32.

The profile

India’s women’s 4x400m relay team — 12 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.