If the biggest news of the just-concluded Commonwealth Games is table tennis star Sharath Kamal, who, at 40, bagged four medals, three of them gold, then collectively, India’s track and field show in Birmingham comes a close second. Eight medals, including one gold, make us bullish about a good performance in the World Championships in Hungary next year and also the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The list is as diverse as it can get. Avinash Sable (silver in 3000m steeple chase), Eldhose Paul and Abdulla Aboobacker (gold and silver in triple jump), Murali Sreeshankar (silver in long jump), Tejaswin Shankar (bronze in high jump), Annu Rani (bronze in women’s javelin) and Priyanka Goswami and Sandeep Kumar (silver and bronze in the women’s and men’s 10000km race walk). Their medal-winning feats are unprecedented in their own ways.
Success offers a huge confidence boost, that too in a Games where top nations like Australia, Jamaica, England, Kenya and Nigeria were participating. But it will be foolish to go overboard with celebrations and rest on the CWG laurels. The World meet and the Olympics are a notch or two higher in the level of competition on offer.
Before August 7, 2021, happened, javelin champion Neeraj Chopra, long jumper Sreeshankar and high jumper Shankar were seen as those with potential to do well in international meets.
The gold medal in Tokyo took Neeraj to the elite league and his awe-inspiring feat has made a whole bunch of athletes believe even they can compete with the best on the big stage. “He is the inspiration,” Sable had said after winning the medal. The 27-year-old armyman’s achievement last Saturday was probably the most remarkable in the recent history of Indian athletics.
Taking on the mighty Kenyans and breaking their stranglehold is a huge thing. Take this — Sable is the first non-Kenyan to win a long-distance medal in Commonwealth Games since Canadian Graeme Vincent Fell in 1994.
Sreeshankar and the gold medal winner, LaQuan Nairn of Bahamas, had leapt the same distance of 8.08 metres but the former came second on count-back. Paul, not of that height to be a triple jumper, cleared the 17-metre mark for the first time in his second major event while Annu is the first Indian woman to win a medal in javelin. Sable (8:11.20s) lost out on the gold medal to Abraham Kibiwot (8:11.15) by a mere 0.05 seconds and beat the bronze medallist, also a Kenyan, by more than five seconds.
“These medals give us hope,” Athletics Federation of India chief Adille Sumariwallah said. Sable is a perfect example of how beneficial foreign training can be. Miles ahead on the national scene, Sable’s stint in Colorado Springs, the US, with coach Scott Simmons was a game-changer. Last month’s World Championships also was a learning curve for him where the race was unusually slow and he ran out of breath in the last lap due to inexperience.
“The US training helped me immensely,” he said. Indian athletics has surely improved when it comes to foreign training, government support and more international competitions, but there is a need for more synergy between the ministry, Sports Authority of India and the federation. This is the time to be more pragmatic vis-à-vis the needs of athletes.
The medals the Indian athletes brought showed their tough mental make-up. Long jumper Sreeshankar, for example, reached just three days before his event after the AFI had shut the doors on him. It took a court intervention to land him in Birmingham. A clutch of athletes are waiting in the wings and proper training can see them grabbing headlines.
Javelin throwers Rohit Yadav, 22, and DP Manu, 22, have the potential to carry on the Neeraj legacy while Gailey Vinester, 22, shows promise in triple jump. In Budapest and Paris, Neeraj will be the cynosure but others, if handled with care, could give us reasons to cheer.
