E-Paper
When all five athletes of a 400m race got disqualified at World Indoor Championships
Abdallaleh Haroun, Steven Gayle, Austris Karpinskis, Alonzo Russell and Bralon Taplin were disqualified in their men’s 400m heats at the IAAF World Indoor Athletics Championships in Birmingham.
In one of the most bizarre incidents on Day 2 of the IAAF World Indoor Athletics Championships in Birmingham on Friday, all five athletes competing in the heats of the 400m men’s event were disqualified because of lane transgressions, perhaps a first in the history of the event.
With Polish Jakub Krzewina and Slovenian Luka Janezic clocking 45.57m and 45.45m respectively to clinch the first two heats, all eyes were on Qatar’s Abdallaleh Haroun to go a notch better. However, he was the first to get disqualified as a false start shattered his journey on the tracks. That left the pool with Jamaican Steven Gayle, Latvian Austris Karpinskis, Bahrain’s Alonzo Russell and Grenada’s Bralon Taplin to aim for a qualification.
But the quartet failed to make the advantage count to their favour as all four were judged to run outside their lanes. The Grenada team did present a protest against the disqualification of Taplin but the jury rejected the appeal. The team claimed that Taplin was on a straight line and therefore didn’t create an advantage but the jury reviewed the incident and found Taplin to have stepped on the line in the curved part of the track.
Apart from the 400m men’s heats, the morning session also included 400m heats for women, 3000m heats for men, 60m heats for women and three heptathlon events for men and three pentathlon events for women.
(The reporter is in Birmingham as part of the Young Reporter’s programme by AIPS in collaboration with the IAAF)
