IAAF World Championships | Tejinder Pal Singh, Jinson Johnson bow out in qualification rounds of respective events
India’s Asian Games gold medallist duo of shot-putter Tejinder Pal Singh Toor and 1500m runner Jinson Johnson crashed out of the World Athletics Championships in Doha on Thursday. Tejinder registered a season-best throw in men's shot put, however, he couldn't clear the qualification mark.
The Punjab athlete Toor produced a season’s best effort of 20.43m to finish eighth in the Group B qualification round and 18th overall out of 34 competitors. He was the first to take the field but with eight shot-putters from Group A having already touched the 20.90m mark which is the automatic final round qualifying mark, it was a difficult task for Toor to go through. The 24-year-old has a personal best of 20.75m, which is also a national record.
Toor, who also won the Asian Championships, opened with a 20.43m which was a step in the right direction as he bettered his earlier season’s best of 20.36m with that. But he fouled his next attempt and the pressure started to mount as three competitors from Group B touched the automatic qualifying mark in their first attempt while another athlete did the same in the second round.
Toor had to touch 20.90m and rewrite his own national record in his third and final attempt to qualify for the finals but he could only come up with a 19.55m effort to crash out of the championships. With a throw of 21.92m, reigning world champion and 2016 Rio Olympics bronze medallist Tomas Walsh of New Zealand led the finalists.
There was more disappointment in store for India as the 28-year-old Jinson Johnson, who broke his own national record just last month with a time of 3:35.24, failed to preserve enough energy for the home stretch and ran a below-par 3 minutes 39.86 seconds to end 10th in his first-round heats on Thursday. He was among the leading five till the final bell but lost steam towards the end as he was overtaken by one competitor after another and finished more than four seconds outside his best timing. He finished 34th overall out of 43 runners.
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