The Hindu : Sport : Asian championships from today

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Wednesday, Jul 25, 2007
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Sport

Asian championships from today

K.P. Mohan

Focus on Renjith Maheswary, Anju and Sinimole

— File Photo

READY TO GRAB: From a realistic assessment, triple jumper Renjith Maheswary has emerged as the best Indian bet for a gold at the Asian athletics championships.

AMMAN: The top-ranked Chinese have not been entered in the five-day 17th Asian athletics championships starting at the Amman International Stadium on Wednesday.

Coupled with Japan’s familiar disinterest towards the continental meet, this gives a tremendous opportunity for the lesser countries, including India, to amass medals that in the normal course would have been beyond their reach.

Since the mid-80s the Asian championships have never been a true barometer of the athletes’ standing in the continent, mainly because the top Japanese invariably skipped the meet, the last time at Incheon in 2005 being an exception.

Now, with the World championships in Osaka just a month away, even the Chinese, not to speak of some of the leading athletes from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Qatar, have decided to give the meet a miss.

Unfortunate

This is unfortunate, especially given the huge responsibility that Jordan took over at short notice after Lebanon expressed its inability to hold the meet in Beirut because of the security situation.

China, which topped the medals tally last time at Incheon, with 15 gold medals, has entered just two winners (woman 800m runner Li Yong and pole vaulter Li Ling) from its World championships trials held in June.

Only two defending champions from China will be around, male walker Li Rongua and woman distance runner Bai Xue. Nineteen-year-old Bai Xue should repeat her distance double.

The presence of a dozen Asian Games champions from Doha should help raise the stature of this meet amidst the thin fields that reflect poorly on a continental championship.

There are just three athletes each in women’s pole vault and heptathlon (Susmita Singa Roy and J.J. Shobha already assured of medals) and only three teams in women’s 4x400m relay in which India should prevail in the absence of the Chinese whose unheralded team had beaten the host at both Guwahati and Pune during the recent Asian Grand Prix series.

Indian athletes won’t be complaining about the lack of challenge.

“Medals are what matter in India, not performance. And we should not forget the incentive cash awards that await the medal winners back home,” said a leading Indian athlete on Monday. Four gold medals at Incheon after the seven-gold feat at the Busan Asian Games was a slump. That slump was further confirmed when the country managed just one gold medal, by the women’s longer relay team, at the Doha Asian Games last year.

Despite the reality, there is no dearth of optimism back home, especially among those in the Sports Authority of India (SAI) who have been charting the projected medals for the country, including in athletics, at the Beijing Olympics on their laptops.

From a realistic assessment, triple jumper Renjith Maheswary had emerged as the best Indian bet for a gold here after his 17.04m in Guwahati last month.

The fact that China had not entered its two season leaders — Zhing Minwei (17.27) and Gu Junjie (17.11) — and pulled out its lone entry Zhu Shijing, also a 17-metre jumper, at the last moment, makes Renjith’s task easier.

It won’t be a smooth ride all the way, however.

In the field are two 17-metre jumpers, Mohammed Ibrahim of Qatar and Korean Kim Duk-Hyun.

And there should be Kazakh Roman Valiyev as well. But the 22-year-old Kerala jumper has a newly-acquired image to protect and he is a tough competitor.

Eyes on Anju

There is also considerable interest in how long jumper Anju George will come through this competition.

She had won untroubled at Incheon, but had finished second to Japanese Kumiko Ikeda at Doha. Ikeda, after having jumped consistently through this season, hit a poor patch recently and is not in the Japanese team.

It will not be a question of whether Anju can win the gold or silver, in the company of Olga Rypakova of Kazakhstan, the only woman in the field who has beaten her in the past, but how far she can jump in order to make it to the World championships. The qualification mark for Osaka stands at 6.60m.

Among the other Indians, most of them aiming for Osaka qualification, Sinimole Paulose should be fancied to bag the 800-1500 double while 400m hurdler Joseph Abraham is also being tipped to be among the medals. There should be minor medals in several other events for the Indians, especially in the middle distance and long distance events.

The only point will be whether they can come close to or better their personal bests.

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