India relay team fluffs baton exchange, gets disqualified

To qualify for the Rio Games, the team will have to run in the range of 43.45 seconds or faster to enter the list of top-16 teams in the world.

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Dutee Chand won the gold with a timing of 11.50, an improvement on the 11.68 she clocked in the heats. (Source: Express File)

A day after the Indian women’s 4×100 relay team broke the 18-year-old national record at the IAAF World Challenge in Beijing, a botched up baton exchange saw the team failing to finish in the heats at the Taiwan Open Athletics meet on Thursday.

Indian athletes travelled from Beijing to Taipei City to participate in their second meet in as many days but in the much anticipated relay event there was disappointment as the baton exchange between the first two sprinters — Merlyn Joseph and HM Jyothi — was completed outside the takeover zone, which resulted in a disqualification and ‘did not finish’ status. Srabani Nanda, the third runner, waited till the other sprinters completed the curve but on realising that her teammates had been disqualified, she walked away from the track. Dutee Chand, who was to run the anchor leg, was the fourth member of the team.

On Wednesday, this quartet had shattered the previous record of 44.43 seconds – set by Saraswati Dey, Rachita Mistry, EB Shyla and PT Usha – by clocking 44.03 in 1998.

However, to qualify for the Rio Games, the team will have to run in the range of 43.45 seconds or faster to enter the list of top-16 teams in the world.

The average of the two best timings registered by a team between January 1, 2015 and July 11, 2016 is taken into consideration to decide the ranking of a country in the relay events. Chand, however, won the gold with a timing of 11.50, an improvement on the 11.68 she clocked in the heats four hours earlier but she was off the Rio Olympics Qualifying Standard which is set at 11.32 seconds.

The travelling from Beijing to Taipei — reaching the airport at 4 am, taking the flight at 8.40 am, landing at 12 pm, reaching the stadium at 1.30 pm and running half an hour later — took its toll on the sprinter, who had missed the qualifying mark by one-hundredth of a second during the Federation Cup last month.

While the women relay team had the opportunity to run two back-to-back events, the men’s 4×100 team could not travel for the Taiwan Open Athletics meet as one of the runners, Abdul Najeeb Qureshi’s passport had to be renewed.

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Moreover, national record holder Amiya Kumar Mallick had not fully recovered from a hamstring injury he suffered during the final of the Federation Cup in Delhi last month.

All eyes on Chopra

Javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra, who equalled the national record by throwing a distance of 82.23 metres at the South Asian Games earlier this year, will continue his quest to qualify for the Olympic Games when he participates in Halle, Germany, on May 21.

Earlier this week, Chopra had finished fifth at the Rehlingen Germany Weltklasse Meeting where he registered a throw of 79.51 metres, an AFI release, stated. The Rio Qualifying Standard for men’s javelin throw is 83 metres.