Jyothi Yarraji

Jyothi Yarraji (born 28 August 1999) is an Indian track and field athlete from Andhra Pradesh. She specializes in 100 metre hurdles and holds the Indian national record.She broke the long-standing record by Anuradha Biswal on 10 May 2022 clocking 13.23s . She has broken the record multiple times ever since.

Yarraji hails from Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Her father Suryanarayana is a security guard and her mother works as a domestic help. She did her schooling at the Port High School in Visakhapatnam old city. She did her education in a college affiliated to Acharya Nagarjuna University. Later, she joined the Sports Authority of India hostel in Hyderabad and trained for two years under coach Olympian N Ramesh, who also received the Dronacharya award. Later, she moved to Guntur to join the Centre of Excellence. From 2019 onwards, she has been training under British coach James Hillier at the Reliance Athletics High-Performance Centre in Bhubaneswar.

Yarraji's career highlight came when she won the silver medal in the 100m hurdles in the 2022 Asian Games at Hangzhou, China. Initially she was disqualified for a false start along with a Chinese athlete but was later allowed take the start. In the end after a review, Chinese athlete Wu Yanni was disqualified and the indian promoted to silver medal. In early 2023, she broke the national record for indoor 60 metres hurdles five times, apart from winning the Silver in the 2023 Asian Indoor Athletics Championships at Astanain Kazakhstan.

Covid 19 and her back injury saw that she took part in virtually no events in 2021, but she came back strongly in 2022. She represented India at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in the 100 metres hurdles and was a part of the Indian Women's 4 X 100 metres relay team that came 5th in the finals. At the 2022 edition of India's National Games, she won the Gold in both 100 metres and 100 metres hurdles. On 17 October 2022, she became the first Indian woman hurdler to clock below 13 seconds becoming the second best Asian in the 100 metres women's hurdles in the year and the 11th best Asian ever. At the 2022 Indian Open Nationals, she was adjudged the best athlete among women.