HANGZHOU: The best long-distance racers know exactly when to time their finishing kick. A 15-minute race is reduced to a 20-second sprint to the line. A punishing 12 rounds around the brown mondo track is brought down to the final bend and the home straight. Most of the athletes are happy to keep pace with the leading pack without taking the lead; hovering somewhere in the vicinity before pushing for the line when the end is in sight.
Parul Chaudhary ticked all of those boxes to win a gold for the ages in the women's 5000m on another perfect track and field night inside the cavernous Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre Stadium. She was second for a point of time in the early stages of the race before preferring to keep a watching brief over the top three.
When the leading pack spread out over the length of a football field with a lap to go, Chaudhary and Ririka Hironaka were the only women left with a chance of winning gold. Both Hironaka and Chaudhary, six years older than the Japanese at 28, were lapping athletes with less than a lap to go. It seemed like the Japanese had put a sufficient amount of distance between herself and the Indian but the margin had slowly been reducing. With less than 50m to go, Chaudhary changed the grammar of the race.
Spotting an opening on the inside, she summoned an almighty kick and went for it. Hironaka, who was looking for incoming trouble on her outside, had left the inside unguarded and the Indian had capitalised to brutal effect. In the end, the steeple-chase specialist upgraded Monday night's silver to gold by the barest of margins (15:14.75 to 15:15.34). "God was kind enough tonight (Tuesday night)," she said after the race before joking: "... in the last 50m, I was thinking that my government would give me a nice job. (Deputy Superintendent of Police in her home state of UP) would be good."
I was depressed: Annu
While India's first gold medallist on Tuesday was tongue in cheek about a government job (she currently works with Railways), the other Indian to win gold at the athletic stadium felt she let the government down so much, she went into a depression. Annu Rani is a seasoned javelin campaigner at the best of times. But her touch had deserted her in 2023. After throwing a personal best of 63.8 in May 2022, the 31-year-old was primed to go up a level.
Instead, her 2023 marks -- 59.24m, 58.22, 59.1, 54.76, 57.05, 52.54 and 57.74 -- had left her in a very dark place. "I was contemplating quitting the sport," she said. "The government was spending crores of money and in return I wasn't able to perform. I was throwing around 54m, it wasn't very good."
On the day, though, she managed to throw a season's best before finding another season's best. After a below par 56.99m in her first attempt, she hurled the spear to a distance of 61.28m in her next throw. It was the best distance she had hurled the javelin since July 2022 (62.52m at an event in Chula Vista, USA, 13 meets ago).
That throw propelled her into the top. With belief flowing through her veins, she threatened the 60m mark in her third (59.24m) before a mark of 62.92m helped her establish a handy lead over the likes of China's Huihui Lyu, a regular 65m+ thrower. With her having an off night, Rani finally enjoyed a night out after a year of regret.
"When an athlete from your own discipline does well, it naturally acts as a motivation for you also to do well," she said when asked about the kind of impact Neeraj Chopra has had.
Chaudhary, who like Rani is also from Meerut, looked at herself in the mirror on Monday night. Silver was not going to be good enough. "Last night I was tired after winning the silver medal," she said. "Slept only for three hours. Since I wasn’t able to win a gold medal in steeplechase, I wanted to get a gold in the 5000 somehow."
The strategy that she had devised with Scott Simmons, one of the coaches Athletics Federation of India brought in to oversee the country's endurance running programme, was simple. "The strategy was to stay with the pack regardless of the pace," Simmons explained after the race. "If the pace was too slow, we wanted her to push. But she never had to. The Japanese set a solid pace. It slowed in the middle, and when it started to heat up in the last 1000m, she looked like she was feeling strong. So she went with the Japanese and then we trained specifically for finishing kicks. And she has it.
"I didn't want her to be slower than 15.20 pace which was 74 (seconds per lap), after the first km it was 72 (per lap). So I knew it was slowing down. It was in the neighbourhood of being a solid race. The leaders slowed down and she stayed with them. She didn't have to be in the lead, just be in the striking distance."
The US-based Simmons also reckoned that it was Chaudhary's extra gear that secured the race and not any sort of Japanese tiredness. "I think it was Parul’s extra gear," he said. "She wasn’t complacent. She was going for gold, they both were. Parul just had the finishing kick right there at the end. We developed speed outside for 5000m and we also train for speed development."
For the Japanese runner it was a 'shame'. "When I was running the last 100m, I thought I had won," she said later. "It was a shame that I was passed in the last few metres. I was aware that there was an Indian runner behind me, but in the end I was struggling and just running with my head facing forward.
Like they say, athletes can never be sure before the finish line.
National record for Tejaswin
Tejaswin Shankar set a new national record in the men's decathlon. After the end of a gruelling two-day, 10-event meet, Tejaswin, who won silver behind China's Qihao Sun, finished with 7666 points. The earlier record stood in the name of Bharatinder Singh (7658). After the last event, the 1500m, he said that he would go back to his specialisation -- the high jump -- ahead of the Paris Olympics.