Bhubaneswar, June 27: In a bizarre incident, Tamil Nadu’s R Harshitha was made to re-run the women’s 400m hurdles alone on Saturday due to a goof-up by race officials, and she eventually failed to qualify for the finals at the National Inter-State Senior Athletics Championships.
On Friday, the 21-year-old Harshitha had finished third in Heat 1 with a time of 1 minute, 01.03 seconds and was initially adjudged to have qualified for the final.
However, it was later discovered that Lane 8, in which she was running, had only nine hurdles instead of the mandatory 10, with the fifth hurdle missing due to a bizarre goof-up by the race officials.
After clearing the fourth hurdle, a confused Harshitha crossed over to lane number 7 and cleared the hurdle there. She then moved back to her original lane and completed the race. Karnataka’s Megha Munavallimath was way behind in the race and so there was no collision with Harshitha.
Later, Harshitha was asked by the officials to re-run the race alone at 9:30am on Saturday, citing World Athletics Competition Rule (CR) 18.7, which allows the race referee to order a re-run in certain circumstances.
She did so but clocked 1:02.54, 1.51 seconds slower than her original time, and failed to qualify for the eight-athlete final.
An official of the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) admitted to the goof-up but said human errors occur even in big events.
The race official cited the case of Indian javelin throw superstar Neeraj Chopra whose first throw was not recorded by the officials at the 2022 Asian Games in China because of a technical glitch with the electronic distance measurement system.
The scoring system experienced a technical delay, failing to log the distance. While Chopra was waiting for his score, officials gave the green light to the next thrower and Chopra’s exact landing mark was lost.
Chopra accepted the re-throw and won gold with a best of 88.88m. (PTI)
