India, April 5 -- Gulveer Singh is so close. Just 220 milliseconds away. (With 1,000 milliseconds in a second, we're talking blink-and-you-miss-it close.)

It will be hard to bet against him becoming India's first 10,000m runner to directly qualify for the Olympics (Surendra Singh ran that distance at Beijing 2008, but on a quota).

Gulveer Singh smashed his own national record by more than 14 seconds last week, at the Ten 2025 athletics meet in California.

Olympic qualification or not - LA 2028 is pretty far away - that 27:00.22 finish puts Singh where no Indian has been before: firmly among the elite runners in the world at that distance, and with a chance to race at the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September (the qua...