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NEW DELHI: Star sprinters Dutee Chand and Hima Das will make one last attempt to book their Olympic berths in the National Inter-State Championships beginning in Patiala on Friday. The 'B' category five-day event offers some of the top athletes the chance to either breach qualifying standards for an automatic Olympic berth or garners valuable ranking points to make it to the Games.
Dutee missed the automatic qualification mark of 11.15 seconds by two-hundredths of a second during the Indian Grand Prix 4 here on Monday, though she broke her own national record. She will be looking to do better and book an automatic berth though she is on the verge of making it to the Tokyo Olympics on the basis of world rankings.
Hima, who has had a lower injury problem for a long time, ran her personal best of 20.88 seconds in 200m at the IGP 4 but missed the automatic qualification mark of 22.80 seconds.
She has to breach the qualifying standard if she wants to book a Tokyo ticket as her world ranking may not be good enough for an Olympic berth. Hima is also a part of the 4x100m relay quartet along with Dutee, Archana Suseendran, and S Dhanalakshmi, who are looking to book a Tokyo Games berth. They broke the national record during the IGP-4 but their timing of 43.37 seconds was not enough to place them in the top 16 in the Road to Tokyo list. Besides the 4x400m mixed relay team, as many as 11 Indian athletes have already qualified for Tokyo Olympics in individual events.
Meanwhile, the two Olympic-bound athletes, star javelin thrower Neeraj Singh, who is currently on a training-cum-competition tour of Europe, and 3000m steeplechaser Avinash Sable will not take part in the event.