National inter-State meet – The Hindu

In a bizarre development, R. Harshitha, a 400m hurdler from Tamil Nadu, had to run alone during her heats on Saturday following an overnight technical goof-up in the National inter-State athletics meet at the Kalinga Stadium here.

Despite her determined solo re-run on her debut at the meet, the 21-year-old Harshitha — who had recorded her personal best of 1:00:03 last October — clocked 1:02.54 on Saturday morning to narrowly miss out a berth in the final by 0.05 seconds.

A day before, Harshitha, running in lane No. 8, was surprised not to find the fifth of the 10 hurdles. She got confused and switched to lane No. 7 to jump over the hurdle there and went on to finish the race. When she saw the video, she noticed that the technical officials had not placed the hurdle at the designated spot. Harshitha raised a complaint, following which the Athletics Federation of India (AFI), as per rules, allowed her to do a re-run at 9.30 a.m. on Saturday.

“They said, ‘you should have run in your own lane’. If I (had) run, I would have missed my rhythm without a hurdle,” said Harshitha.

“I was totally confused. I thought I went onto the outer lane. So I came into the seventh lane. After finishing, I understood what I did. When I saw (the live telecast), there was no fifth hurdle and I reported that. They asked me to re-run.”

It is reliably learnt that the AFI has issued a 24-hour show-cause notice to the two technical officials who were responsible for the embarrassing episode.