Shot putter Tajinderpal Singh Toor and long jumper M Sreeshankar will be expected to earn gold medals for India in the Asian Athletics Championships which gets underway at the National Stadium in Bangkok, Thailand, on Wednesday.
With reigning Olympic Games javelin throw champion Neeraj Chopra, Commonwealth Games 3000m steeplechase silver medalist Avinash Sable and Praveen Chithravel, who leads the men’s triple jump season top list, opting to stay away from the meet, India will be hoping that at least a couple of others would step up for a better return that last time.
India won two gold, through Toor and 1500m runner PU Chitra, eight silver and five bronze medals in the last edition in 2019. Of course, it cannot be forgotten that Gomathi Marimuthu had finished first in women’s 800m but had to forgo the medal for testing positive in a sample collected a month before.
Talk of doping brings us to the decline of the women’s 4x400m relay squad for a variety of reasons, not the least being doping-related absence of the likes of MR Poovamma and Anjali Devi as well as the drop in form of athletes like VR Vismaya and Jisna Mathew and the long absence of Hima Das from the 400m scene.
There will be considerable interest in the performance of sprint hurdler Jyothi Yarraji and long jumper Shaili Singh as the most promising of the new crop of athletes, as well as Tejaswin Shankar who will vie to become the first Indian to win a decathlon medal in the championship since Bharat Inder Singh got a bronze in 2011.
China’s Qiaho Sun as well as Japanese pair Yuma Maryumaand Shun Taue have logged better performances than Tejaswin this year but he has shown himself to be a determined competitor. While he will be the first Indian athlete on view, competition will be so keen that the four Indians in three finals will have to put their best foot forward to be among the medals.
Annu Rani, a bronze medalist in women’s javelin throw in Bhubaneswar in 2017 and a World Championship finalist last year, has not crossed the 60m mark this season. That has put a couple of Chinese stars, including Olympic champion Liu Shiying, and a pair of Japanese throwers ahead of her this season.
In the women’s 1500 final, Lili Das, not the best Indian metric miler this season, could find it tough against the Japanese pair of Nozomi Tanaka and Yume Goto and Sri Lanka’s Gayanthika Artigala. China’s Xu Shuangshuang can also be a tough nut to crack in what would essentially be a tactical race.
Gulveer Singh and Abhishek Palhave have to run a well-planned race to edge past either of the more fancied Japanese Ren Tazawa and Yuto Imae, and Tiianyu Chen of China in the men’s 10,000m final. The other Indians on view on Wednesday will be quarter milers Muhammed Ajmal and Rajesh Ramesh in the men’s heats and Aishwarya Kailash Mishra in the women’s heats.