The Dhing Express

The rain had left the paddy fields soft and muddy. On the narrow raised paths between them, a group of boys were chasing a football, shouting and slipping. In the middle of them, faster than all of them, ran a girl in bare feet.

Her name was Hima Das, and in the village of Kandhulimari, in Assam, nobody could catch her.

Rice fields and football

Hima was born in 2000, near the small town of Dhing, in the Nagaon district of Assam, in north-east India. Her father, Ronjit Das, and her mother, Jonali, grew rice on a small plot of land. It was a large family, and money was always tight.

There was no running track anywhere near the village. Hima did not even know, as a young girl, that running could be a sport. She loved football and played with the boys whenever she could, in the fields and on whatever open ground they found.

Her physical education teacher at school watched her race up and down the football pitch. He suggested that she try athletics instead. She was, he thought, far too quick to waste.

A coach who believed

In 2017, Hima ran in a local competition in a pair of cheap shoes. A coach from Guwahati, Nipon Das, was watching. He was amazed by her speed, even though she had almost no training or proper technique.

He went to her village to speak to her parents. He wanted Hima to come to Guwahati, the state's largest city, where she could train properly. Her parents were worried. Guwahati was far away, they could not afford to pay for her to live there, and she was still very young.

The coach promised to help with her stay and her training. After much thought, her parents agreed. It was a brave decision for a farming family with little money: to send their daughter away to chase a dream that nobody in their village had ever chased before.

Learning to run

In Guwahati, Hima trained harder than she ever had. She learned how to start, how to pace a race, and how to breathe. At first she ran the shorter sprints. Her coaches soon saw that she had the strength and spirit for the 400 metres, one of the hardest races in athletics: a full lap of the track, run almost at top speed from start to finish.

She improved at an astonishing rate. Within about a year, she was running at the Commonwealth Games in Australia, where she reached the final of the 400 metres.

Tampere, 2018

In July 2018, Hima Das went to Tampere, in Finland, for the World Under-20 Championships. She was eighteen.

In the final of the 400 metres, she was not in the lead for most of the race. Coming round the final bend, she was behind. Then, on the home straight, she found another gear. One by one, she passed the runners ahead of her, and crossed the line first.

She had won the world title. She was the first Indian athlete ever to win a gold medal in a track event at a world athletics championship, at any age level.

On the podium, as the Indian national anthem played and the flag went up, Hima stood very straight, and tears ran down her face. A short video of that moment was shared across India, and millions of people found themselves crying with her.

Back in Kandhulimari, her family and neighbours celebrated. The girl who had played football in the mud was now known across the country. Newspapers gave her a nickname after her home town: the Dhing Express.

More than medals

A few weeks later, at the Asian Games in Jakarta, Hima won a silver medal in the 400 metres, setting a new national record, and a gold medal as part of India's women's relay team. That year she received the Arjuna Award, one of India's highest sporting honours.

She did not forget where she came from. In 2019, when floods swept through Assam, she was widely reported to have given half of her monthly salary to help people who had lost their homes, and she asked others to help too. Later, she joined the Assam Police as an officer.

Hima has faced injuries and difficult seasons since then, as almost every athlete does. But in a corner of Assam where girls once had no running track, no coach and no idea that such a life was possible, children now know her name. Some of them, in the paddy fields after the rain, are already running.

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Hima Das's results, including her 2018 world title, are listed by World Athletics, the sport's governing body. Her Arjuna Award is recorded by India's Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports.