India’s crowning glory at CWG

Birmingham: Sport can be cruel. It can raise you to dizzy heights and bring you down with equal force in a matter of split seconds, split points, or millimetres. The gap between first and second can be in inches, or as it turned out for long-jumper Murali Sreeshankar at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, by centimetres. Or less.

The Kerala youngster was right up there, good for gold, but a few mistakes and some definite misfortune relegated him to silver. While that in itself matches the best that India have ever done in the Commonwealth Games long jump, it could so easily have been gold. The 23-year-old national record holder soared to 8.08m in his fifth attempt to finish second behind Laquan Nairn of Bahamas in a nerve-wracking men’s long jump final. Nairn also had the best jump of 8.08m but his second best of 7.98m was better than 7.84m of Sreeshankar. Under rules, if two jumpers are tied on the same distance, the one who has a better second-best effort will be ranked ahead. Jovan van Vuuren (8.06m) of South Africa took the bronze. The other Indian in the fray, Mu[1]hammed Anees Yahiya ended at fifth with a best jump of 7.97m.

“The gold medal winning distance today was not 8.09m. It was like 7.99m. We were tied together at 8.08m. He had a second best of 7.98m. So, I just required 7.99m. I went all out with my last jump, and I again fouled with the smallest margins. It’s my hard luck but I’m happy with silver,” Sreeshankar said.

Sreeshankar had gone into CWG as gold medal favourite on the basis of his season’s and personal best of 8.36m, which had put him in joint second ranking in the world this season. But he struggled in his first four jumps regarding his landing on the foot board. He was outside the medal contention at the end of the fourth round as he was at sixth place at that stage but his fifth attempt of 8.08m took him to the second place. In a dramatic final round jump, he seemed to have crossed the 8m mark -- which would have given him a gold -- but to his and the Indian contingent’s disappointment, his foot landed 1cm ahead of the line on the foot board. The final attempt was thus ruled as a foul and Sreeshankar had to settle for a silver.

 Sreeshankar’s silver was the best among Indian male long jumpers in the CWG. Suresh Babu had won a bronze in the 1978 edition