The English an Athlete Needs, Stage by Stage

In July 2018 Hima Das, 18, became the first Indian woman to win gold at the World Under-20 Athletics Championships. The Athletics Federation of India posted a clip of her speaking to the media after her semi-final with the words “Not so fluent in English but she gave her best there too.” It apologised after the reaction, PTI reported.

The public was right. She was in Finland to run, and she ran faster than everyone.

The episode still tells a family something useful. English does not make an athlete. But it turns up at fixed points in a sporting life, each time asking for a little more, and none of those points is a surprise.

Stage one: the camp and the classroom

The first need is the plainest: keeping up with school while training.

In 2019 the Sports Ministry directed federations and the Sports Authority of India (SAI) to hire tutors for players in long national camps, in Mathematics, Science and English among other subjects, at up to ₹15,000 a month, Scroll reported. That was the position reported in August 2019. Check with the federation or the SAI centre whether a tutor is provided at the camp your child attends.

Hockey India looked at the same gap from the other side. In 2013 its high performance manager wanted an English tutor for the players, because foreign coaches could not follow what players were trying to tell them, according to Sportskeeda.

At this stage the target is small. Follow an instruction. Ask a question. Say where it hurts.

Stage two: the foreign coach

Indian sport hires foreign coaches in many disciplines, and they usually work in English.

Volker Herrmann, the German high performance director of Indian athletics in 2019, could talk in English with long jumper M Sreeshankar. With most others he could not, and a lot of time went into explaining what he wanted, Scroll reported. He decided to learn Hindi himself.

Gholamreza Mazandarani, the Iranian head coach of U Mumba in the Pro Kabaddi League, said the same of his squad in 2023: “Some players find it difficult to understand because they don’t know English properly,” he told MyKhel. He too was learning Hindi words.

Good coaches meet the player halfway. The player who can meet them gets more of the coach.

Two details make this stage easier than it sounds. The first is that the vocabulary is narrow. Neeraj Chopra, who has trained under coaches from Australia, Germany and the Czech Republic, has said he learned vocabulary from his coaches. That comes from a promotional interview released by a language-test company in 2025, so read it as his own account and nothing more.

The second is that the hard part is often the accent. Piyush Chawla, describing his first Indian Premier League season to ESPN in 2025, said his trouble with the Australian coaches was their accent more than the language. He asked his captain to repeat things.

So practise listening. Watch interviews and coaching clips from the country the coach comes from.

Stage three: the foreign university

This is the first point where English is tested with a number.

Universities in the UK, Australia and Canada ask for an English test score. Our guides give the usual bands for the UK, Australia and Canada. The US route adds the SAT or ACT, where reading speed decides a good part of the score. Germany is the exception: most of its bachelor’s courses need German, not English.

Before any test comes a first email to a coach. How to contact a foreign university athletic coach shows what it should contain. The writing side of this stage has its own article: English and written communication.

The test has to be prepared for beside board exams and a competition season. A family that decides on this route in Class 11 has less time than it thinks.

Training and competing abroad

An athlete who travels abroad to compete or train meets the same need without a university attached. Officials, hosts and athletes from other countries usually fall back on English as the shared language.

The gain is more than getting by. An athlete who can talk to a rival from Kenya or Japan after a race learns how they train. One who can follow a clinic, a team meeting or a physio abroad takes home more from the same trip. English decides how much of an expensive tour turns into learning.

Stage four: sponsors, selectors and interviews

The last stage is speaking for yourself to someone who can say yes or no.

A sponsor wants to hear, in two minutes, who the athlete is and what the money will do. Asking for support covers that first pitch. A sports quota post or a company job ends in an interview, and the athlete’s advantage in corporate hiring only counts if the athlete can describe it.

Athletes are better prepared for this than they expect. Standing in front of a panel is close to what competition already trains, as Composure under scrutiny explains. What is usually missing is the words.

English is also a paper in most of the exams an athlete may sit as a second route. It is a section in SSC CGL, banking and defence exams, as our guide to government job exams lists, and reading in English is what the verbal section of the CAT rewards. The same daily habit serves the sport and the exam.

The daily part is vocabulary

Every stage above rests on the same base: knowing enough words that listening stops being work.

Vocabulary is the one part of a language that fits an athlete’s day. It needs no desk and no hour. Ten minutes on a bus is enough, which is the whole argument of Micro-study during travel and competition.

EnglisHours, a sister project of ours, is for improving English and vocabulary. Use it, flashcards or a notebook. The tool matters less than doing it every day.