NEW DELHI: Indian athletes seldom use the Olympics to serve notice of their potential. They win plenty of medals elsewhere, but at the biggest stage, stage fright overwhelms them, reducing potential medal winners into nervous wrecks. There were a few cases of the above-mentioned affliction at the London Games, but KT Irfan proved to be a glorious outlier. He finished 10th in the men’s 20 km race walking category, with a time of 1:20.21 (a national record).
Since then, however, the Kerala athlete has taken five steps back for every forward one, thanks to the vortex of injuries.
After the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon, they became more pronounced, and he was off the roads for close to 18 months. He was in purgatory during that period; things became so bad that his thought process did not even entertain getting back to competitive action. He even missed the Rio Olympics.
It was in that background that he entered a highly-competitive field at the Max Bupa 20 km National Race Walking Championships here on Saturday. “Finishing inside the top-five so as to qualify for the Asian Championships was the only aim. I wanted to take it step-by-step,” he tells Express.
The smile, wider than the world’s biggest hanger, said it all. He had finished first. Forget the Asian Championships, his time was good enough for the upcoming World Athletics Championships in London.
India has developed a propensity to throw up race walkers and the 27-year-old has a simple explanation: Alexander Artsybashev. The Russian has been training the Indian team since 2011, and it’s obvious that Irfan is happy under him.
“He has a different training methodology when compared to the Indians. Along with strength and long-distance conditioning in the off-season, he focuses on speed during events. So as the season progresses, we’re able to build on those things.”