ATHLETICS | Bangkok offers another good chance for mixed relay team to qualify for Olympics

India's 4x400m relay teams qualify for Paris Olympics, with mixed relay team aiming for qualification at Asian Relays.

With both its men’s and women’s 4x400m relay teams qualifying for this July’s Paris Olympics, there was double joy for India at the World Relays in Bahamas on Sunday.

And the mixed relay team, which failed to make the cut for the Olympics at the World Relays, will get another chance to qualify for Paris at the Asian Relays in Bangkok on May 20.

“Since the 4x400m men and women have already qualified (for Paris), I think we will do only the mixed relay at the Asians,” M.K. Rajmohan, the deputy chief athletics coach, told The Hindu from Thiruvananthapuram — the relay team’s training base — on Tuesday evening.

“Anyway, the selectors and the chief coach will decide on that after the Federation Cup (at Bhubaneswar, May 12-15).”

Rajmohan is confident that the mixed relay runners would make the cut for Paris in Bangkok though they will have to break the National record (3:14.34s, Asian Games, China, October 2023) to achieve the feat.

“We have two girls running 51-plus (split timings Jyothika Sri Dandi 51.36s, Subha Venkatesan 51.65, in women’s 4x400m at World Relays). And our boys are good, so they can definitely go below 3:13.50s,” he said.

With 14 slots for the Olympics already taken in Bahamas, only two berths for Paris are available in the mixed relay and India has to clock better than Italy’s 3:13.56s to make it to Paris through the World rankings route and pray that nobody else clocks a better time before the June 30 deadline.