I WAS quite surprised to read in your sports columns about the ‘record-breaking’ feat of sprinter Liaquat Ali of the Army in the 46th National Championships which concluded in Islamabad recently. His reported timing of 9.90 seconds and 20.65 seconds for the 100 and 200 metres is quite baffling, and outwardly doubtful.

“To the best of my knowledge, no Pakistani sprinter has achieved better than Abdul Khaliq’s 10.30 seconds and 10.20 seconds (wind-assisted) on cinder-tracks, in fairly contested events,” recalls John Permal, Pakistan’s former national sprint champion from 1964 to 1974, who also clocked a personal best of 10.40 seconds in Bonn, Germany in 1971.

Without taking away the thunder from Liaquat’s wins in the national championships, I think the best way to corroborate Liaquat’s true ability and validate the ‘National Record’ would be to send him immediately for an international meet to match his world-class timings in Pakistan against world-class sprinters!

In many of his past international appearances, he has failed to better the national record of 10.42 seconds. This sudden burst seems superficial.

For a better understanding of what happens in world-class competitions, here is an update from the records books of the last Olympics in London, 2012, in which Liaquat represented Pakistan; going there with a claim of achieving a personal best of 10.10 seconds.

In Heat number two of four of the preliminary rounds (races held before round 1 in which seven heats are held before the three heats of the Semi-Finals), Liaquat finished 4TH with a time of 10.90 seconds behind sprinters from Suriname (10.55), Indonesia (10.80) and Gabon (10.89), respectively, and failed to qualify! Women on athletics’ world-stage were running faster in the XXX Olympiad!

Timings at international athletic meets are recorded by advanced technology photo-finish camera systems which record speeds of 100th of a second! How was Liaquat’s ‘record breaking’ feat timed on the Islamabad tartan?

Menin Rodrigues

Karachi

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play