Concerns UK athletes will be ‘rusty’ at Olympics
GUY LEARMONTH fears the UK’s leading athletes will arrive in Tokyo severely under-cooked if the Olympics go ahead after another major event fell victim to Covid.
UK Athletics (UKA) bowed to the inevitable on Friday by cancelling the British Indoor Championships which were due to be staged in Glasgow next month.
Although UKA received a £394,000 grant from UK Sport’s Business Continuity Fund to allow the meeting to go ahead behind closed doors, the prospect of up to 500 competitors from across the country gathering at the Emirates Arena had seemed increasingly untenable despite plans for mass testing.
It is understood that both Scottish Athletics and UKA are both exploring options for smaller events which would give athletes a chance to qualify for the European Indoors in Poland which are still slated to take place in early March.
But with that showpiece also in doubt, many Olympic hopefuls are now resigned to going almost 18 months without competition if the summer season proceeds as scheduled. And Learmonth is worried that there will be no way to prepare properly for Tokyo.
“Nothing replicates going through the feelings of racing, and the travelling and the nerves and call room and all that sort of stuff,” the 800 metres star said. “We replicate a lot of time trials in training, trying to get nervous, trying to do everything that we do for a race day. And it’s not the same.
“The last thing I want to do is come out in June in the Olympic trials, having barely raced. You’re going to be really rusty. I think a lot of athletes will be dying just to get the legs moving again. It’s obviously a big problem. Thankfully, I made the decision to do a couple of races last summer. A lot of folk haven’t raced since October 2019.”