Were athletes actually robbed of Rio qualification?

Were some of the elite athletes of the country deprived of a chance to qualify for the Olympics because of a power shutdown at the Capital’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on Sunday?

Before the events started in the afternoon, yes surely they were confronted with a fait accompli: “Run your best, no matter what your timings are in the sprints, you won’t make it to Rio Olympics”.

The regulations laid down by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) for Olympic qualification state: “Hand timing performances in 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 110m/100m Hurdles, 400m Hurdles and 4x100m Relay will not be accepted”.

As such the AFI knew, at least the technical officials knew, that there would be little point in athletes gaining any timings in short races without a fully automatic timing system in place. Perhaps the media knew, too, at least those familiar with IAAF regulations, record ratifications etc.

One is not sure whether the athletes knew about the futility of clocking personal bests and Olympic standards when there was no power supply and thus no electronic timing system.

Blame game

 There is little point now in going through the blame game that was expectedly resorted to by the host, Delhi State Athletics Associaion, the AFI and the Sports Authority of India (SAI) for not having provided a back-up for electricity supply for a “qualification meet” of this nature. We can go on and on but it would not be of any use.

Should the sprint events have been cancelled since the AFI knew there could be no qualification? That would have been foolish. Why deprive athletes of a chance to compete? Moreover this meet was a good build-up exercise for the more important Federation Cup starting at the same venue four days later.

The power outage made headlines in the National dailies.  “Power failure robs athletes of Olympic qualification”. That was the crux of the argument in most of the reports.

Before the events started, as I noted earlier, yes it robbed them of a chance. But after the end of the events? Who were all close to the Olympic standards in sprint events? Or was there anyone at all? It may look easy when the difference is 0.2s or 0.4s but place it alongside a 100m timing and then see the difference between 10.1 and 10.3. Better still 10.1 and 10.10s.

It has been reported that both men’s and women’s 100m timings were better than existing National records and both also were better than the Olympic entry standards. But since there was no automatic timing system in place, both would be deprived of both the honours.

This is not a true description of the events or the timings returned by the athletes. In men’s 100m Odisha’s Amiya Kumar Mallick clocked 10.09 seconds. This was hand-timed. This should have been rounded off to 10.1s before it was cleared by the technical officials (chief timekeeper, chief judge etc) and passed onto the recorders and from there to the communications team and onto the media. Same with the timing of 11.23s clocked by Srabani Nanda, also of Odisha. That should have been 11.3s.

Just because modern stop watches provide timings up to a hundredth of a second it should not mean these are equivalent to electronic/automatic timings. Nor should it have meant that the chief timekeeper would pass on a timing measured up to a hundredth of a second and the recorder would also make it look as though this was automatic timing without re-checking.
Once you get 10.09s for a 100m it is taken for granted that this was automatic timing. On the other hand a timing given out as 10.1 would make it clear it was hand-timed.
Now if the media were pre-briefed about the power breakdown and absence of automatic timings and the resultant bar on Olympic qualification and provided these results as 10.1 and 11.3 in the official results sheets things would have been far better and different.

Media could have been briefed

It could have been done with an explanation that though these hand-timings may look to be better than the existing National records they indeed were not since a fully automatic time of 10.30s (National record in men’s 100m) was always superior to a hand-timed 10.1s and an automatic 11.38s (National record in women’s 100m) was clearly above a hand-held timing of 11.3s.

Would anyone have then reported that there were ‘national records’?

Or for that matter an automatic timing of 45.48s (achieved by K. M. Binu in 400m in Athens Olympics) has to be surely rated far above that of a hand time of 45.5 (rounded off to the next lower tenth of a second from 45.41s that was credited initially to Mohammad Anas in the Delhi meet).

In order to compare hand-held timings with automatic ones, athletics statisticians had devised a formula by which 0.24s was added to the 100m and 200m timings and 0.14s to 400m and above.

Though several of the Olympic Games timings were officially recorded as hand-timings, automatic timings, where available were later approved as “automatic” for those events including for example for the 1960 Rome Olympics. (It was not until 1964 that Olympics started using automatic timings but till 1972 Games results were given only in hand timings.)

Milkha's record

Rome was where the great Milkha Singh clocked 45.6s (hand) for the fourth place in the 400m. Later when the IAAF, guided by leading statisticians around the world accepted automatic timings ‘where available” and incorporated them within parenthesis to those results, it became 45.73 (not 45.74 the mark that could have been logical had the 0.14s conversion formula been applied to it).

Why this particular record of Milkha is being mentioned here is because of the controversy the subsequent national records in 400m created thanks to this “revision”. Milkha never accepted the argument that someone could clock 45.7-plus and still claim his record of 45.6 was bettered! Paramjeet Singh did that (45.70s) in Calcutta in 1998 and the AFI ratified that record. Any other dispute related to Paramjeet’s record is a different matter.

Hand-timings are nothing new in Indian athletics. We have had these for longer periods than most developed countries around the world. Sometime in the 1990s the AFI brought in automatic timings. Gradually, all senior national-level meets and then junior national-level meets were mandatorily timed with automatic system.

Hand-timings have inherent deficiencies. The time-keepers are actually expected to look for the flame/smoke from the gun (held aloft by the starter against the background of a black board) and not hear the sound before pressing their stop watches. You are not sure how many of them would be seeing the flame and how many of them would have pressed when they heard the sound. There is a considerable time gap if the sound determines the action of the official in the short sprints.

At the finish, too, there is considerable margin for error.

To have clocked 10.09s (10.1 hand) and then be credited, even if through the mistakes of the technical officials, with a national record, bettering the existing one of 10.30s is something that should not have happened at all. 

For comparison purposes, through the conversion formula, 10.09 will first become 10.1 (adjusted up to the lower tenth of a second) and then if we add 0.24s it will become 10.34s. Not good enough to beat NR of 10.30, and nowhere near the Olympic entry standard of 10.16 if we were to just compare these timings and not presume that hand-timings would be allowed for qualification.

Of course the IAAF does not accept hand-timings for sprints as entry standards for Olympics and World Championships etc, as mentioned above, and it also does not accept hand-timings for races up to and including 800 for the purpose of world record ratification. The AFI follows the IAAF pattern mostly, though there is nothing written down about ratification regulations.

That an explanation was eventually made to the media, despite having been supplied with the timings of 10.09, 11.23 and 45.41 was thanks to the intervention of the AFI Technical Committee Chairman, Tony Daniel, who was away in Kerala and could not make it for this meet in Delhi, but who was alerted about the discrepancy by a journalist, baffled by the news about a flurry of “national records”!

Suriya's record is legitimate

Now, a curious mention was made in several reports about the timing returned by Suriya Loganathan in the 3000 metres. Amidst the confusion created by the sprint timings, national records that were never set, Olympic standards etc it was also reported that Suriya’s 9:04.5 will also not be considered for National record ratification  purposes even though it was better than Molly Chacko’s existing mark of 9:06.42 set at the Hiroshima Asian Games in 1994.

Why should Suriya be denied her legitimate right for this distance, where an auomatic timing system is not mandatory, is not clear. Obviously someone made a mistake in informing the media. Unless there are other issues related to Suriya’s performance, the Tamil Nadu woman has to be credited with the NR in this event run occasionally in domestic meets nowadays. It is an early-season event for the distance runners these days to prepare for the tougher and longer races.

“Suriya robbed of record amidst confusion” would have been an apt headline.

In athletics, unlike say in swimming, there are no pre-designated qualification meets to attempt entry standards for Olympics. Any ‘recognized’ meet conducted by a national federation under the IAAF rules would do provided qualified officials and standard equipment were utilized. Thus there should be no question of either stripping the Delhi meet of the ‘qualification’ tag or informing the IAAF that such a tag has been removed. Had a couple of athletes qualified in say long jump or triple jump or discus would such a tag have been removed? (If it indeed had been removed!)

The participation level in a meet in which individual entries were entertained for the first time was pathetically poor. The standards too remained ordinary if we were to exclude the hyped up sprints and a couple of other events. Hand-timings do provide a rather distorted picture in sprints and that is what happened in the Delhi meet.

Amiya Mallick (previous best 10.51s), Srabani Nanda (11.58s) and Anas (46.66s) will surely be expected to look forward to the Federation Cup from April 28 to 30 to repeat their performances and make the cut for Rio. They will need to clock 10.16s, 11.32s and 45.40s. all through automatic timing system to make the Rio-bound team. It is a tough task.

Hopefully the AFI will have the power back-up this time just in case things go wrong again!

(updated 26 April 2016)