Sprinter Jahir fails to impress in 400m
Bangladesh's sprinter Jahir Rayhan produced a lackluster performance in the 400m run in Tokyo Olympics, where the 20-year-old athlete ended up registering a timing that was far off from his personal best, at the Olympic Stadium in Japan this morning.
Jahir, the nation's sole representative in the track and field event as a wildcard entry, stood eighth out of eight competitors in Heat-3 with a timing of 48.29 seconds. Overall, he was positioned as the 44th out of 47 athletes in this event.
American sprinter Michael Cherry won the Heat-3 race with a timing of 44.82 seconds while Brazil's Lucas Carvalho clocked 46.12 seconds to finish in the 7th spot ahead of the lad from Sherpur. This meant that the 7th placed runner was closer, in terms of time difference, to the winner (1.3 seconds) than Jahir (2.17 seconds) at 8th.
Jonathan Jones of Barbados finished as the runner-up followed by Jamaica's Chistopher Taylor who grabbed the 3rd spot, with scores of 45.04 and 45.20 seconds, respectively.
Jahir's performance in the end is bound to raise a question regarding the justification of Bangladesh Athletic Federation to select the Navy sprinter, who could not even beat his season best performance (47.2) he made in the Bangladesh National Athletics Championships in January, 2021.
However, Jahir, who had been considered to be a promising sprinter following his semifinal qualification in Junior World Athletic Championships in Nairobi in 2017, later broke a 32-year-old national record in the 400m sprint in 2019 by clocking 46.86 seconds which has still remained his personal best. He then went on to bag a gold medal from the same event in the 35th Indian Junior Athletic Championships held in Andhra Pradesh in 2019, having clocked 47.34 seconds.
With Jahir's run in Tokyo, Bangladesh's journey in the Olympics campaign reached its end as well.
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