IAAF World Indoor Championships: Siddhanth Thingalaya finishes sixth in heat, bows out
Siddhanth Thingalaya, who holds the national record for both the 60m and 110m hurdles, was tipped to go through to the next round but failed miserably, with a slow start ending his challenge at the IAAF World Indoor Championships.
The Indian challenge at the IAAF World Indoor Championships, here in Birmingham came to a sorry end on Saturday as Siddhanth Thingalaya, the lone participant from the nation bowed out finishing sixth in his respective heat.
The 27-year-old from Mumbai, who holds the national record for both the 60m and 110m hurdles, was tipped to go through to the next round but failed miserably, with a slow start ending his challenge at the championships.
Thingalaya finished at 7.93s, slower by 0.23s of his timing at the UW preview meet in Seattle last year. Thingalaya said after the race: “I didn’t anticipate the gun-shot (the signal to start the race) and that ruined it all. Hence, I reacted extremely slowly and my reaction wasn’t very good.”
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Thingalaya’s was, in fact, the slowest reaction time of the pool, a dismal 0.268 setting him off a poor start.
He did recover well given that he beat Javier McFarlane of Peru who had a reaction time of 0.141 but it was never enough owing to the startling speed at which Saudi Arabia’s Ahmad Kh.A. l-Molad completed the heats.
However, Thingalaya stated that he wasn’t going to be bogged down by the failure and would rather take it in his stride given that he would be flying back to India to take part in the Nationals at Patiala. “This is a learning lesson for me and I just hope to use this experience for the better,” he said.
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“I won’t claim that I would be completely fresh as I head to Patiala since I would have to travel so much. An athlete requires a certain amount of rest after every race. Also, there’s going to be this transition about going from an indoor event to the outdoors but I’m happy that I would be running on Indian soil.”
NOTE | The reporter is in Birmingham as part of the Young Reporter’s programme organised by AIPS in collaboration with the IAAF