There are somethings in Indian sport that are inexplicable. Despite massive influx of money, the standards just remain to be poor, and no or significant improvements aren’t to be seen. What is even more heartbreaking is, some disciplines in various sports going backwards, in terms of their performances.
4x400m Relay Team Raises Concerns at Paris Olympics
4x400m women’s relay seems to be one of those grey areas, where India has shown in the past, that they could do well, but have fallen back to the standards of 40-50 years back. In the Paris Olympics, the Indian women’s 4x400m relay team came with one such performance. Reasons notwithstanding, the Indian team of Vithya Ramraj, Jyothika Dandi, MR Poovamma, and Subha Venkatesan clocked a poor timing of 3:32.51s.
That meant that the Indian quartet had finished last in their heat, and only Cuba had clocked a worse timing that ours. One would ask, why is a poor performance anyways? The answer is simple, the national record stands at 3:26.89s, which was set in Athens Olympics in 2004. Since then, we haven’t been able to achieve a better timing. There we had finished overall seventh with a timing of 3:28.51s in the final.
If that is not enough to set the alarm bells ringing, then our time of 3:32.51s is even worse than what our women’s team had achieved in 1984, at the Los Angeles Olympics. Then, our ladies had clocked 3:32.49s to finish seventh in the final. In that event, the USA team had clocked 3:18.29s to win the gold.
This just goes on to show, that we might have some brilliant athletes in track & field, with the likes of Neeraj Chopra, Murali Sreeshankar, Avinash Sable and a few others, but the overall standards remain still poor.
Not Just Relay, Other Events Pose Challenge Too
4x400m relay is just one such discipline. The women’s 200m national record set by Sarswati Saha has not come down since 2002. 400m hurdles NR set by PT Usha hasn’t been bettered since 1984, women’s long jump since 2004, and heptathlon also since 2004. These are just a few events, but then every other event has national record yet to be broken in over 5-6 years.
So where is the improvement. We often talk about our standards improving, but the ground realities remain far from it.
