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Ellina Mhlanga Senior Sports Reporter
NATIONAL Athletics Association of Zimbabwe director of coaching, talent identification and development Lisimati Phakamile has challenged local coaches to up their game as the qualifying standards for the World Athletics Championships gets tougher.
World Athletics recently announced the qualification standards for the 2023 World Athletics Championships to take place in Budapest, Hungary, and they have significantly improved the standards in a number of events.
Just like in 2019 and 2022, athletes will be able to qualify for the World Championships by achieving entry standard or through their placing on the world rankings.
The qualifying standards continue to improve.
For instance, for the last edition, the qualifying standards for 100m men and women was 10.05 and 11.15 respectively. For the 2023 World Championships, the time has been set at 10.00 for men and 11.08 for women.
For the 10 000m athletes will have to clock 27:10.00 for men and for women its 30:40.00 compared to 27:28.00 and 31:25.00 for the last edition.
In 5 000m event, the qualifying time is 13:07.00 for men and 14:57.00 for women, compared to 13:13.50 and 15:10.00 in the last edition.
For marathon, the qualifying times are 2 hours 9 minutes 40 seconds for men and 2 hours 28minutes for women. In the last edition, the qualifying time was 2 hours 11 minutes 30 seconds for men and 2 hours 29 minutes 30 seconds for women.
Phakamile said with the standards continuously improving, they have to pull their socks up if the country is to have athletes qualifying for the global meet.
“The standards are quite tricky and challenging to the athletes.
“But it is needed because the quality of performances worldwide, if we look at the previous World Championships, if we look at the World Junior Championships, having juniors running 9.9, records being broken, the standards have to go up or else the quality of athletics will also go down.
“In Zimbabwe, this is a wake-up call for our coaches. We just have to pull up our socks, we need to plan, prepare and also try to push our athletes to the world standards.
“It’s quite a challenging feat but it has to be done or else our country might not have athletes qualifying for those events,” said Phakamile.
Zimbabwe managed to qualify only three athletes for the last edition held in Eugene, Oregon, United States.
Athletes are already focusing on the next world meet.
Some of the hopefuls for Zimbabwe include triple jumper Chengetayi Mapaya, who was at the last edition, and sprinter Tinotenda Matiyenga, who qualified through the worlds rankings for 200m.
For distance runners, in particular, the 5 000m and 10 000m runners, they also have the chance of qualifying in a road race this time around.
“We also welcome the development of having 10 000m being qualified on the roads. It gives us more options and it gives more opportunities to our athletes to qualify, of which that is a positive note from the standards,” said Phakamile.
The qualification period for the marathon and 35km race walk opened on December 1, 2021 and ends on May 30, 2023. For the 10 000m, 20km race walk and combined events, the window runs from January 31, 2022 until July 30, 2023.
For all other events, the qualification period opened on July 31, 2022 and runs up to July 30, 2023.
Online Reporter