Animesh Kujur might have failed to finish among the top-three in his maiden appearance at the Diamond League, but he is quite confident of making it to the World Championships to be held in Tokyo in September.Speaking a day after the Monaco Diamond League meet, where he finished fourth in 200m in the U-23 category, Kujur said, “I’ll qualify. Don’t worry.”To make it to the worlds in 200m, he will have to run a time of 20.16 seconds, which is 0.16 seconds faster than his personal best of 20.32 seconds. It’s going to be difficult but his coach Owen Martins also believes his pupil can achieve the target.
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“Given the right race, the right people, and the right surface, it would be possible. There’s 20.16 seconds in there somewhere. And that’s a phenomenal improvement. Says a lot about the hard work he’s done. He was banging out 20.5 seconds last year and we’re thinking, like, what’s going to happen? When’s he going to break the national record?” said coach Martins, who trains Kujur at Odisha Reliance Foundation Athletics High-Performance Centre (HPC) in Bhubaneswar. And empowering athletes for global success, the Odisha govt is supporting HPC athletes in gaining international exposure and competing with the world’s best.Even if Kujur doesn’t make the qualifying time, he can make it to the Worlds through the points system and he is currently ranked 39 in the world. As for the Friday’s race, neither Kujur nor his coach was happy with his showing but the former footballer is more than happy with the experience.“I expected more but I competed with big athletes like Gout Gout and some others also who are national record holders of their country. So running with fast athletes will only make you fast,” said Kujur during a virtual interaction.“I also met Noah Lyles and Letsile Tebogo and saw their warm-up routines and how they train which I’m going to implement in my warm up in the coming days.”Meanwhile, Martins blamed the headwind for the slower time and admitted that Kujur wasn’t as fit as the other athletes. “We had a relay camp, the Asian championships and then the meet in Taiwan. We then flew here and we’re not quite as fit as we need to be. And that was very evident on Friday night how fit everybody was — all the Diamond League athletes,” said Martins.As a result the coach now wants to get back to the basics but did say that his pupil’s starts have immensely improved thanks to working with the SNC coach Chris Woolley at Magglingen Sportzentrum in Bern, Switzerland.“We did some movement pattern work with him over a couple of sessions and we adapted that into the start. So the starts improved immensely but we could still make a few hundred seconds better there,” Martins added.Whether he is able to do that will be evident during his next few events, the first of which is Spitzen Leichtathletik in Lucerne, Switzerland, on July 15. The next will be the World University Games after which he will be competing in Bhubaneswar at the World Athletics Continental Tour.
