Lankan quartet ready for London World Athletic Championships
View(s):A decade after sprint-queen Susanthika Jayasinghe won country’s second medal at the World Athletics Championships in Osaka, Japan, a team of Sri Lankan athletes will travel to London on Monday for the 2017 World Athletics Championship.
The World Championships will be held from August 4-13 where the cream of world’s best athletes including sprint great Usain Bolt expected to vie for honours.
But any chance of winning a medal remains a distant dream this time around for the Islanders, even though all four athletes enter the biannual event having reached the required qualifying standards.
Jayasinghe won women’s 200m silver in 1997 World Championships in Athens and three-years later produced Sri Lanka’s first Olympic medal in 52-years in Sydney.
Seven years later she won her third major international medal when she clinched 200m bronze in Osaka to become country’s most decorated sprinter of all time.
Sri Lanka has endured a dry spell in athletics since then but their performance at the regional meet—Asian Championships was a welcome respite for the Islanders.
Sri Lanka won gold and three silver medals at the regional championships held in India last month, country’ biggest medal haul in many years.
Among the four athletes who will represent Sri Lanka at the World Championships which will start on August 4th are two marathoners, a javelin thrower, and an 800m runner.
Profiles
Marathoner Anuradha Indrajith Cooray, the flag-bearer at the Rio Olympics is a seasoned campaigner, having featured in two Olympics and two World Championships but the 39-year-old has never been a medal contender at these high profile championships.
In 2015, he produced the performance of his life clocking 2 hours: 13 minutes 47 seconds at the London Marathon, a new Sri Lanka record erasing a 40-year-old record set by SLB Rosa at the Fukuoka Marathon in 1975.
Domiciled in the United Kingdom, Cooray has been training with the Vale of Aylesbury Athletic Club in Birmingham qualified for this year’s Championships when he returned a time of 2 hours: 17 minutes and 06 seconds at the Rio Olympics.
Hiruni Wijeratne, a US-based marathoner won the Eugene Marathon on her way to achieve the qualifying standard. The 27-year-old Sri Lankan becomes only the second Sri Lankan female marathon runner to qualify behind Niluka Rajasekera, the current national record holder who ran at the Beijing meet in 2015. Like her male counterpart, Wijeratne is not a medal prospect and will look to improve her personal best performance in the event.
Nimali Liyanarachchi – is a champion middle distance runner who became country’s first 800m runner to win an Asian Championships gold medal. Liyanarachchi clocked 2:05.23 seconds to become the regional champion and to realize her dream of running at the world’s biggest stage—the world championships this year. The 27-year-old has a personal best of 2 hours 2.59 secs and has shown consistently improved performance during the last few years.
The last of the quartet is javelin thrower Waruna Lakshan Dayaratne. He will become the first Sri Lanka thrower to compete at a World Championships. He was not among the medalists in Odisha (Asian Championships) as he came up with a substandard performance but his performance at a recent trial helped him earned a passage to London. He cleared 82.19 metres and is currently among the 32 top throwers in the world who will compete in London.
The World Championships will be held from August 4-13 where the cream of world’s best athletes including sprint great Usain Bolt expected to vie for honours.