Sohan Reddy

Long before athletics became serious, Sohan simply loved movement.

Growing up in Saudi Arabia, he was naturally drawn toward competition. Whether it was racing people, scoring goals, or winning small games, sport gave him something the classroom often did not: confidence.

Academics came with pressure.

The football pitch came with freedom.

Even as a child, he instinctively knew which environment felt more like home. No one aggressively pushed him toward athletics in those early years. The drive existed naturally within him. Competition excited him in a way very few things could, and over time, sport slowly became the place where he understood himself best.

Before there were medals, rankings, or structured ambitions, there was simply a boy who loved to run.

Between the ages of 13 and 15, while most teenagers spent evenings online or with friends, Sohan built a very different routine for himself.

Night after night, he would show up to an empty stadium and train alone.

There was no coach standing beside him. No audience watching. No validation waiting at the end of the session. Just repetition, discipline, and the quiet understanding that improvement depended entirely on what he was willing to do when nobody else was looking.

That phase became foundational to the athlete he would later become.

Training alone taught him something difficult very early in life: consistency cannot depend on motivation. There are days where discipline has to carry you when excitement disappears entirely.

And for years, that is exactly what he did.

No matter how repetitive the process became, he kept showing up.

Again and again.

When COVID shut the world down in 2020 and 2021, many athletes struggled with the sudden loss of routine, structure, and competition.

Sohan approached the period differently.

During lockdown, he and his twin sister developed a training dynamic that quietly became one of the most important developmental phases of his athletic journey. The exchange worked both ways. She helped sharpen his technical understanding, while he pushed intensity, consistency, and discipline in return.

Those months became far more valuable than they initially appeared.

Without the constant noise of competition, the focus shifted toward refinement. Small details. Technical consistency. Repetition without distraction.

The lockdown period slowly transformed raw athleticism into something much more complete, controlled, and refined.

And the progress became visible soon after.

Eventually, the discipline began attracting attention.

Sohan was recruited into the Jubail Club, and for the first time, the boy who spent years training alone in empty stadiums found himself competing inside a structured national-level environment in Saudi Arabia.

The transition carried emotional weight.

Up until then, most of his growth had happened privately, without much external recognition. Joining the club became the first real validation that his obsession, sacrifice, and consistency were actually leading somewhere meaningful.

It changed the scale of his ambition.

What once felt personal suddenly started feeling possible.

Then came the injury.

A severe ligament tear forced Sohan into complete bed rest and left him dependent on crutches. For someone whose identity had been built so heavily around movement, the experience became deeply unsettling.

The boy who had spent years running under stadium lights suddenly could not walk without help.

For the first time in his life, athletics was completely taken away from him.

The injury interrupted far more than training. It disrupted rhythm, confidence, routine, identity, and emotional stability all at once.

And during recovery, he was forced to confront something many athletes spend their entire careers avoiding:

What remains when sport disappears?

Recovery fundamentally changed the way Sohan understood himself.

For years, athletics had occupied almost every part of his identity. But during the injury period, he slowly reconnected with parts of himself that existed outside competition and performance.

He picked up a pencil and started drawing.

He sat at a piano and started playing music.

His family became a far deeper emotional anchor.

None of these things became distractions from athletics.

Instead, they became reminders that he was more than just an athlete.

That realization completely shifted his relationship with sport. Rather than treating athletics as the only thing defining him, he began seeing it as one important part of a much fuller life.

And in many ways, that perspective made him mentally stronger than before.

In 2023, Sohan joined DTU.

For most athletes, the first year of collegiate competition is usually a period of adjustment — new systems, higher expectations, unfamiliar pressure, and different standards.

Sohan approached it differently.

At the Inter IIT competition hosted at BHU, he won gold in the 400 metres and broke the college record in his very first year.

It was not the kind of result people expect from someone still adapting to the collegiate level.

It was immediate impact.

A statement that years of invisible discipline had already prepared him for bigger stages long before people realized it.

And the success only strengthened his belief that he was still nowhere near his ceiling.

The Saudi Games became the biggest stage Sohan had competed on up to that point in his journey.

But the timing could not have been worse.

At the exact same time, he was managing end-semester examinations, splitting his attention between textbooks and starting blocks. Mentally, it felt like living two completely different lives at once.

Still, he competed.

He finished fourth.

And in that race, he was the only Indian athlete participating.

Although he narrowly missed the podium, the experience left behind something far more valuable than a medal. It reinforced a belief that had already been growing inside him for years:

Hard work beats talent.

That conviction became central to the way he approached both athletics and life afterward.

Today, Sohan is the Athletics Captain at DTU while studying Mechanical Engineering.

He has already won four gold medals, but when people point toward those achievements, he does not describe them as the peak of his journey.

To him, they represent proof.

Proof that discipline compounds.

Proof that consistency matters.

Proof that years of invisible work eventually reveal themselves publicly.

But more importantly, his mindset has evolved.

He no longer trains through desperation or fear.

He trains with gratitude.

What he describes as a “radiant mindset”  a mentality built not only around pushing himself forward, but around positively impacting the people around him as well.

That shift has made him calmer, more grounded, and far more self-aware.

And despite everything he has already achieved, he genuinely believes this is only the beginning.

Because for Sohan Reddy, the story was never just about medals.

It was always about becoming someone strong enough to earn them.