CWG 2022 — I need to forget the 3000m steeplechase silver first, says Avinash Sable

‘I have to restart training as if I have not achieved anything. I do feel happy. But the main focus is to be better and not think that I have done something extraordinary.’

Avinash Sable wants to forget the Commonwealth Games silver soon. “I need to forget this achievement first,” the 3000m steeplechase medallist tells The Hindu, on his return from Birmingham.

“I have to restart training as if I have not achieved anything. I do feel happy. But the main focus is to be better and not think that I have done something extraordinary. I remember my losses and learn from them. I forget my victories.”

This mentality is perhaps what helped Sable overcome the disappointment of having finished 11th at the World Championships. In what was the slowest steeplechase final in World Championships history, he clocked 8:31.75s, his worst time since October 2019. In Birmingham, he went 8:11.20s for silver and bettered his best performance for the ninth time.

“It was a very difficult time,” Sable says of the period after the Worlds. “I was training in the USA and everybody there believed ‘Avinash is going to win a medal’. I, too, thought that my practice was good.

“But I had never experienced such a race in my life. The race was slow and I was behind but I didn’t know what happened. I had done a lot of speed workouts and still I could do nothing. I finished 11th and I thought, ‘I could have finished 11th even without any practice. If I couldn’t achieve anything with so much good practice, maybe I won’t achieve anything ever’.

But the despondency didn’t last long. Training was the only tool the 27-year-old had and he knew that. Belief in his methods soon returned, enough to tell him that he could break the Kenyan hegemony in men’s steeplechase, where they had won all 18 medals since the 1998 edition.