New Delhi: For all the pre-Games hype surrounding him, India’s fastest man Gurindervir Singh’s performance in the much-anticipated 100m proved a damp squib. The 25-year-old ran a sub-par 10.39secs to come second in his heat and finish a disappointing 28th among 73 sprinters who competed. The top 17 moved into the semi-finals.
Running in Lane 5 in Heat 4, Gurindervir made a decent start and stayed alongside Jamaica’s Rohan Watson through the early stages before the Jamaican powered away over the final 30-35 metres to win comfortably in 10.13 seconds.
Watson, who has a personal best of 9.91 seconds, opened a gap of around two metres by the end to finish comfortably ahead. Watson was overall ninth and made the semi-finals that will be run on Tuesday. The result meant the Indian missed the semi-final cut-off for which 17 athletes qualified, the slowest among them clocking 10.24secs.
Ghanaian duo of Benjamin Azamati (10secs) and Abdul-Rasheed Saminu (10.01secs) took the top two spots followed by England’s Elliot Jones, who stopped the clock at 10.07s.
The race was run with a legal tailwind of 1.5 m/secs, but Gurindervir could not convert the favourable conditions into a faster time. His 10.39 seconds was far from his national record of 10.09 seconds, set at the Federation Cup in Ranchi in May, where he became the first Indian to run under 10.10 seconds.
{{/usCountry}}The race was run with a legal tailwind of 1.5 m/secs, but Gurindervir could not convert the favourable conditions into a faster time. His 10.39 seconds was far from his national record of 10.09 seconds, set at the Federation Cup in Ranchi in May, where he became the first Indian to run under 10.10 seconds.
{{/usCountry}}The race also underscored Gurindervir’s inconsistency. His Federation Cup performance, where he ran 10.17secs in the semi-final and 10.09secs in the final, was preceded by a 10.44secs result at the Saudi Athletics Grand Prix in Riyadh and a 10.40secs run at the Indian Athletics Series in New Delhi.