The pathetic state of Sports Authority of India (SAI) and the Delhi State Athletics Association (DSAA) on Sunday simply robbed Indian athletes of their precious Rio Olympics berth at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium.
The Indian Grand Prix which is a great platform for Indian athletes to qualify for the Rio Games in August witnessed a sudden power failure at the start of the event and it created panic amongst the officials and athletes.
Despite the Nehru stadium having backup generators installed within the arena, there was not a single stadium staff to operate the 10 generators as they came up with some lame excuse that Sunday was their off day. So, the event had to continue without any power back-up and it was the manual recordings for all the events. Unfortunately, the manual timings are not considered for records by International Association of Athletics (IAAF). To make the matter worse, the organisers even withdrew the Olympic status of this event.
Soon, there were three new national records in men’s 100m, 400m and women’s 100m. Srabani Nanda of Odisha not only created a new national record with a timing of 11.23 seconds but also managed to meet the qualifying mark for Rio. Similarly, Amiya Malik of Odisha also achieved the Rio qualification mark with a national record of 10.09 seconds in the men’s 100m. Meanwhile, Kerala’s junior athlete Mohammad Anas despite failing to win Olympic ticket, broke national record in the 400m with the timing of 45.5 seconds. All three were just banging their heads in utter frustration after knowing that manual timings cannot be taken as records by IAAF.
As it happens all the time, a blame game, too, began very soon between SAI and the DSAA as both shrug off their responsibilities. A DSAA official said “the fault lies with SAI because a full amount of Rs 5 lakh was paid in advance for the event”. However, SAI stadia in-charge Kapil Kaul claimed that “neither DSAA paid us for any power back-up at the time of booking nor arranged for its own generators”.
Later it was revealed that this was the first time that SAI was charging for any national championships. In the past, all the national-level events at the stadium were conducted free of cost. “I have taken over charge here only three days back. I can only say that at the time of booking, Athletics Feferation of India (AFI) or any other association didn’t specifically ask or pay for any backup generator. Basically, it was AFI’s fault that neither a generator was arranged nor being paid for to SAI for such an emergency,” said Kaul.
Indian chief coach Bahadur Singh was totally disgusted over the unfortunate situation and said that “Srabani and Amiya could well have qualified because there’s only 0.2 to 0.4 second difference between electronic and manual recordings”.
Now, the next Olympic qualifier will be the Federation Cup event to be held at the same venue from April 28 to 30. Indian athletes will have another opportunity at the second Indian GP in Patiala on May 7. In June, Kolkata’s inter-state athletics championship will be last event to be held in India.