Steeplechase: Sable sets a national record, but misses out on final

NEW DELHI: For Avinash Sable and his coach Amrish Kumar, the goals for the Tokyo Olympics were straightforward: run a time that no Indian has run before. Kumar, Indian Army’s long-distance running coach, told his pupil that even if he were to come last in his 3,000m steeplechase race in Tokyo, it was fine as long as he beat his personal best.

And the 26-year-old from Mandava, a village in Maharashtra’s Beed district, did just that. Sable lowered his own national record, clocking 8:18.12s in Heat 2 of the 3,000m steeplechase on Friday, shaving a good couple of seconds off the 8:20.20s he set in the Federation Cup in March.

The seventh-place finish in his heat, however, was not enough for a place in the final, narrowly losing out as the fastest runner to have failed to make it to the 15-man field for the medal race. “He (Sable) gave it absolutely everything in terms of the optimal capacity at this point of his career,” Kumar said from Tokyo. “He came here with the target of doing his best, and he did. To return with a national record from the Olympics, given the level of the international athletes, is not a small thing.”

From each of the three heats, the top three finishers get automatic entry into the final while the next six with the fastest times across the heats qualify as “fastest losers”. Sable’s time was better than the runners who finished in the top three in Heat 3 (who went through anyway), but was the seventh-best among those up for non-automatic qualification, and 13th overall.

“This is how the rules are, and we knew this beforehand,” Kumar said. “The runners in Heat 3, with the advantage of knowing exactly how much was required to qualify, would have set their pace accordingly.”

Sable did not once lose pace with the pack, and even had a slender lead for a brief while. At the 1,000m mark, he was sixth, slipped to seventh place at the 2,000m, and held on to it at the finish line.

Since turning from cross country to steeplechase in 2017, Sable has set a new national record five times, including in the 2019 World Championships final, where he became the first Indian man to enter a Worlds final, and qualified for the Olympics.

Sable trained in Ooty and Bengaluru for the last year and a half after the pandemic pushed the Games back, even contracting Covid-19 in April. “It’s an excellent performance considering the circumstances leading up to it. We will now turn our focus to the World Championships and the Asian Games. Our target will remain the same going ahead. And hopefully, one day, his day will come,” Kumar said.

Avinash Sable