Neeraj all set to return after seven months
NEW DELHI: Star javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra will return after months out of action following elbow surgery. The 2016 world junior champion and the national record holder confirmed he will take part in the 59th National Open Athletics Championships starting in Ranchi’s Birsa Munda Stadium on Thursday.
Chopra, one of India’s few world-class athletes, was expected to shine in the recent World Athletics Championships in Doha, but injury sidelined him for almost the entire 2019 season. The Ranchi meet comes at the fag end of the season and will help Chopra ease back into competition. “l’m going to Ranchi as I have got the green signal from the doctor to compete,” he said over phone from Patiala, where he has resumed training at the National Institute of Sports.
It will be a good test for the 21-year-old, whose target is to build up and qualify for the Tokyo Olympics. The mark he needs to touch is 85 metres, while his national record is 88.06m. The qualification window opened on May 1 and will run till June 29 next year. Chopra had an outstanding 2018 season—he won the Commonwealth Games and Asian Games titles. The army athlete set the national mark in the Jakarta Asian Games. He last competed in the Services Championships in September last year, where he won gold at 83.90m.
He then went to Potchefstroom, South Africa for international exposure when the elbow problem flared up in March. He underwent surgery in Mumbai the next month. He also missed the Asian Championships in Doha in April.
“The surgery was a success and the rehab has been good. Now, I’m keen to get back to competition. My performance will help me evaluate progress made in rehab,” Chopra said.
Being a season-ending meet, it would be tough for the other leading athletes to come close to their best. Most of them are coming from the Doha Worlds that ended on Sunday. Men’s 400m national record holder, Muhammed Anas, top long jumper Murali Sreeshankar, 1,500m Asian Games champion Jinson Johnson, 3000m steeplechase national record holder, Avinash Sable, and women javelin thrower Annu Rani will also compete in the four-day meet.
Sable twice broke the national mark in Doha last week (8:21.37). He will not push hard, his coach Amrish Kumar said. “We’ve World Military Games from October 18 in China. The competition will be tough as top runners from Kenya will also compete. We have to conserve energy,” he said.
SHEORAN’S BAN
MONACO: Indian sprinter Nirmla Sheoran has been handed a fouryear doping ban and stripped of her 400m and 4x400m relay titles from the 2017 Asian Championships. The Athletics Integrity Unit, which manages track and field doping cases, says she tested positive for the steroids drostanolone and metenolone in sample taken at the Inter-State meet in Guwahati in June 2018.
The National Dope Testing Laboratory in New Delhi returned a negative result, but the World Anti-doping Agency re-tested the sample of four Indian athletes, including Sheoran, in Montreal. All four tested positive. Nirmla, 24, whose biological passport also showed irregular blood readings, “accepted the charge, did not request a hearing and was ready to accept the consequences,” the AIU said. The ban was backdated to June 29, 2018. Her results from August 2016 to November 2018 were disqualified.