One last try for track & field athletes at Olympic berths

Patiala, June 24: A host of top Indian track and field athletes, including the likes of star sprinters Dutee Chand and Hima Das, will make one last attempt to book their Olympic berths in the National Inter-State Championships beginning here on Friday.
Graded as ‘B’ category event by World Athletics, the five-day event offers some of the top athletes the chance to either breach qualifying standards for an automatic Olympic berth or garner valuable ranking points to make it to the Games.
The championship, which is being held under strict COVID-19 protocols, was earlier scheduled to be held in Bengaluru but shifted to the NIS campus here in view of the possible logistical issues as the elite athletes who are based here will not to travel to the Karnataka capital due to the pandemic.
Dutee missed the automatic qualification mark of 11.15 seconds by two-hundreths of a second during the Indian Grand Prix 4 here on Monday, though she broke her own national record. She will be looking to do better and book an automatic berth though she is on the verge of making it to the Tokyo Olympics on the basis of world rankings.
Hima, who has had a lower injury problem for a long time, has to breach the qualifying standard if she wants to book a Tokyo ticket as her world ranking may not be good enough for an Olympic berth.
Hima is also a part of the 4x100m relay quartet along with Dutee, Archana Suseendran and S Dhanalakshmi, who are looking to book a Tokyo Games berth.
Similarly, the men’s 4x400m relay squad of Muhammed Anas Yahiya, Amoj Jacob, Arokia Rajiv and Noah Nirmal Tom will aim to improve its time from 3:02.61s clocked during the IGP-4 to 3:02.56s or even better it to lift itself from the present ranking of 16 to be sure of a Tokyo ticket. (PTI)