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Ellina Mhlanga Senior Sports Reporter
LOCAL long-distance runners that are chasing qualification to the World Athletics Championships suffered a blow following the cancellation of a training camp that was scheduled for South Africa this month.
The National Athletics Association of Zimbabwe were organising for a training camp in South Africa for some of the athletes, particularly those that have been posting promising times that are close to the qualifying standards.
The runners are chasing a qualifying time of 2 hours 11 minutes 30 seconds for men and 2 hours 29 minutes 30 seconds for women. However, NAAZ have called off the camp because of Covid-19.
Among the earmarked athletes are Isaac Mpofu and Ngonidzashe Ncube.
Mpofu and Ncube have had some close times but still need to push to reach the qualifying times.
Their times at the Cape Town marathon held in October were encouraging with Mpofu posting a time of 2 hours 11 minutes 41 seconds. His training counterpart Ncube clocked 2 hours 12 minutes 49 seconds.
NAAZ director for coaching, talent identification and development, Lisimati Phakamile, said the athletes are now training with their respective coaches.
“We are currently preparing for the major championships that are coming up next year. We have four groups that we are looking at and working with as we speak.
“The first group is the current team of youth athletes that is in Lesotho. We are basically going to keep them together, work with them up to until they qualify for the World Junior Championships and Africa Youth Championships.
“We also have the marathon team that was supposed to be in camp in South Africa. Unfortunately the camp has been called off due to Omicron variant, the Covid outbreak. We have since brought the team back, they are actually working here in Harare under their coaches.
“We are hoping that we are going to qualify from our local talent. We recently had a strategic meeting with the middle and long distance runners. We had a meeting with their coaches as well. We were trying to figure out the best solution, trying to figure the best way we can achieve qualification from home grown talent here in Zimbabwe.
“So we have come up with a roadmap, we have come up with a strategy on how we can achieve all those goals,” said Phakamile.
The Africa Youth Championships are in March and the association will be building on from the team that represented the country at the just-ended African Union Sports Council Region Five Youth Games.
They also have the African Senior Championships in June. This will be followed by the World Championships in July and the World Under-20 in August.
“Finally we have the team of sprinters that we are focusing on. We have set out our local qualifying standards so that we push our athletes to perform better. We hope that the covid issue will be sorted by the time out competitions resume.
“So we are basically down on the ground working, coaches are working flat-out in their clubs with their athletes.
As an association we will begin to start our selection the moment we start the first competitions, so that we are able to have them perform as they try to qualify and move forward,” said Phakamile.
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