“The moment I released the shot put for the first time, something within me unlocked,” Krishna Jayasankar Menon (23) says, describing a memory that still feels vivid years later. 

At the time, she was just a schoolgirl in Chennai who had stumbled into athletics almost accidentally after a physical education teacher spotted her during lunch break and suggested she try throwing. Krishna herself did not yet realise how far that simple yet poignant moment inside a throwing circle would carry her. 

But before the national records and the international recognition came years of early morning commutes across the city, exhausting training sessions before and after school, the loneliness of moving abroad at 18, and the repeated heartbreak of coming painfully close to wearing the India jersey. 

Today, Krishna is the first Indian woman to cross the 16-metre mark in indoor shot put, the first Indian female thrower to receive an NCAA Division I scholarship, and one of the country’s most compelling field athletes. 

Yet the story of how she arrived there is less about sudden triumph and more about the slow accumulation of resilience through sacrifice, reinvention, discipline, and stubborn belief.

Tracing her beginnings

Long before anyone outside athletics knew her name, there were already signs that Krishna possessed an unusual kind of mental toughness.

Her father, former India basketball player C Jayasankar Menon, remembers an incident from when she was barely three or four years old, when she injured her palm badly enough for blood to begin “oozing out”, yet somehow remained smiling through it all. 

Years later, that same stubbornness would become one of the defining qualities of her athletic career.

Sport was never treated as an extracurricular activity in the Menon household. Krishna grew up in a family where basketball shaped the rhythm of everyday life.

Her father captained the Indian men's national basketball team, while her mother, Prasanna, captained the Indian women's team before later coaching Southern Railways and serving as a national selector.

Their home regularly hosted some of Indian basketball’s most respected names, and conversations about training, competition, discipline, and sacrifice formed the background music of Krishna’s childhood.

“Sport was seen as a celebration in our house,” Krishna tells The Better India. “It wasn’t optional. It was normal.” 

Ironically, her first attraction to sport had little to do with dreams of medals or records. “One reason I took up sports was that it got me out of class,” she says with a laugh. “If you told me I didn’t have to attend math class, that was a win for me.” 

But everything changed for her in Class 5 at SBOA School and Junior College, when a physical education teacher named Thirumala Jyoti spotted Krishna during lunch break and immediately saw the makings of a thrower in the tall, broad-shouldered child crossing the campus. 

Krishna still laughs at how casually life-changing that moment turned out to be. “The scouting is so funny,” she says. “She just looked at me and said, ‘You’re tall, you’re built for this.’”

The first time Krishna stepped into the throwing circle and released the shot put, something clicked in a way she still struggles to fully explain. “When I went to the track, I felt like there was a calling,” she says. “The moment I released the shot put for the first time, something within me unlocked.”

Building an identity beyond inheritance

As she grew older, throwing became the first space where Krishna could exist entirely on her own terms, outside the shadow of an already celebrated sporting family. “Basketball belonged to my parents,” Krishna says. “Throwing felt like something I discovered for myself.” 

Carrying the Menon name in........

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