Sport - Athletics

Gajanan wins pole vault gold

K.P. Mohan

PUNE: It poured through the afternoon, leaving the runways wet, throwing circles flooded and athletes and officials a harried lot by the end of the opening day of the National combined events and jumps championships on Thursday.

Many events were postponed to the second day in the hope that morning will bring some relief from the rain. Especially hazardous was pole-vaulting in the given conditions and rightly the women’s and girls’ event was put off.

Thin fields often mark this annual exercise and Thursday was no exception with heptathlon having just three entries. A dozen started in decathlon, but there were only half that number left at the end of the day.

Expectedly, P.J. Vinod and Susmita Singha Roy led the decathlon and heptathlon fields with the former ending the day at 3722 points and the Bengal girl compiling 3134 points.

Vinod’s closest challenger, Ram Niwas of Haryana was on 3501.

“It was tough going in the rains. I was hoping for 1.94m in high jump, but ended at 1.74. There could be no grip on the wet runway,” Vinod said. The Kerala youngster had started well with 10.98s in the 100m, 7.05m in long jump and 13.10m in shot put, all improvement over his Federation Cup performance in Kolkata last month, but fell back a little with below-par efforts in high jump and 400m in pouring rain.

Susmita recorded 14.67s in 100m hurdles, 1.67m in high jump, 10.84m in shot put and 25.46s in 200m, all well below her potential and season bests.

Bharatender Singh won the men’s long jump with a distance of 7.60m, while Gajanan Upadhyay claimed the pole vault gold with a below-par 4.60m.

On a day when the organisational machinery was stretched to the limits, the technical officials did a commendable job to at least complete the programme in the combined events.

However, as it often happens, the media, if a lone correspondent on the spot could be termed thus, was left high and dry amidst rain and slush.

Time was when the AFI managed the results on a daily basis with just a typewriter and a photocopying machine and a couple of dedicated officials.

Now, with laptops and desktops in vogue, the task should have been simpler.

But it is not. No one knew where the decathlon and heptathlon scoresheets were. There was no idea about who will distribute the results.

The man in charge, Rahul Pawar, not on the spot, when contacted,said that the organising secretary, Prahlad Sawant, could be requested. Mr. Sawant was not available at the ground.

Mercifully, the Technical Committee Chairman, S.P. Pillai, dug out the results for one to write them down. The AFI keeps talking of promoting athletics, but just cannot have a man in charge of the media at the venue.

Technological advancement is fine as long as those who take the trouble of covering an event are provided with the results and not asked to look up in websites.

The results: