“Can you question the decision of a panel which consists of Olympians and the best brains in India?” asks Adille Sumariwalla, president of the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) in an interview in these columns.
You can if this panel has come up with a competition calendar in which it expects aspiring Indian athletes aiming for Olympic qualification to just keep training at Patiala or Bangalore without a competition for two months while the rest of the world is busy competing.
That is what many of our athletes did during May and June.
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Sumariwalla, a former National sprint champion, said in the interview that an expert panel was formed immediately after the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and this panel decided four domestic meets and four international meets would be “ideal for Olympic qualification.”
It was not just qualification that mattered; the panel should also have gone into meticulous planning of the competition programme for those athletes already qualified so that they could peak nicely towards the Olympics.
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Both did not happen. The athletes who were yet to get an Olympic standard were frustrated in spending time at Patiala while those who had qualified like Tintu Luka were looking for opportunities to compete in tougher competitions to improve.
Who all did enjoy such privilege of competing even in the four meets sanctioned by the experts?
Not Joseph Abraham for one. The Kerala 400m hurdler is an Asian Games champion and not a ‘B’ grade athlete.
He was the best among those still aiming to achieve a norm at home. Abraham failed in the Fed Cup in April last to reach the target of 49.80s by 0.18s. He was confident that he could do it. He had failed by one-hundredth of a second for Beijing Olympics. “This was much easier than what it was four years ago (49.50s). I could have done it”, he would say later.
From April 24 to June 24, Abraham did not compete though he kept pressing for a chance to compete in a few international meets. He got nothing except promises. He tried his luck at the inter-State in Hyderabad and failed. With the July 8 deadline for qualification looming large he went to Almaty for the Asian All Stars and clocked 50.22 while winning.
Almaty happened to be the lone international meet charted for Abraham; he did not get the four that Sumariwalla has now mentioned. Nor did 400m runner P. Kunhumohammed get that many competitions.
Plan never materialised
The ‘execution’ of the experts’ plan did not happen. Quite often plans remain on paper for approval by concerned agencies. A tour of Europe for a select group of athletes, planned last year, never materialised.
One of the ‘experts’ who did not want to be named, said on Monday that such a meeting as mentioned by the AFI president was never held. If it was held, he was not informed, he said.
Should there have been a restriction of four meets for those aspiring to make it, including three in quick succession in Thailand in May when athletes could have been expected to reach some level of performance only in June?
As for the four domestic meets mentioned, the majority of the athletes could not compete in the two Indian GP meets at Patiala since they were expected to bear their own expenses for participation in these meets.
Effectively it boiled down to two domestic meets, the Federation Cup in April and the inter-State in June-end, with nothing in between except for a chosen few by way of Asian GP and that too only in a limited number of events.