Bizarre blunder! missing hurdle forces solo rerun, Harshitha misses final

BHUBANESHWAR: The fourth morning of the Inter-State Championships witnessed a bizarre incident at Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar on Saturday.After all the races of the morning session had concluded, Tamil Nadu’s Harshitha R was forced to run alone in a rerun of the women’s 400m hurdles heats after it was found that she had cleared a hurdle in the adjacent lane during the heats on Friday evening.The confusion arose when she discovered mid-race that the fifth hurdle in her lane was missing. Harshitha later learnt that Lane 8 had only nine hurdles instead of the mandatory 10. In an attempt to avoid missing the hurdle altogether, she crossed into Lane 7 after the fourth hurdle and cleared the hurdle there, resulting in a lane infringement.“I was confused. Totally confused. I kept wondering, ‘Where is the hurdle?’ I thought I had gone into the outer lane, so I moved into lane seven and cleared that hurdle,” said Harshitha after competing in the solo rerun on Saturday morning.“But after finishing, I was thinking, ‘What have I done?’ Then I watched the replay on the live feed and saw that there was no fifth hurdle in my lane. That’s when I reported it to the officials, because there were still more heats to come.”After lodging a verbal protest, Harshitha was offered the option of running the rerun either on Friday evening or Saturday morning. She was also informed that a time faster than 1:02.00 would be enough to qualify for the final.

“The officials said I needed to run in my own lane. But if I had simply continued without clearing the missing hurdle, it would have thrown off my rhythm completely,” said Harshitha, who was competing in her first Inter-State Championships and has a personal best of 1:00.03 set last year.Harshitha had originally clocked 1:01.03 in Friday’s heat. However, she managed only 1:02.54 in the solo rerun on Saturday morning and ultimately missed out on a place in the final.

While running alone is never easy, the challenge was compounded by the heat and humidity during the morning session.Interestingly, the rerun was not broadcast and Harshitha was made to wait for a considerable period before taking the track. If sources are to be believed, technical issues delayed the proceedings.The Athletics Federation of India (AFI) was yet to issue an official statement on the incident at the time of publication. Questions remain over how a hurdle was missing from Lane 8 during a national-level competition that is also serving as an Asian Games qualifier, and why the error was not detected before the race began.However, the damage had already been done, with Harshitha's hopes of making the Asian Games suffering a major setback.