Athletes must come out of comfort zone'

Athletics chief coach Radhakrishnan Nair says Open Nationals mandatory to get selected for relay teams

- CHANDRA PRABHU @Chennai

INDIA'S athletics chief national coach P Radhakrishnan Nair is not a person who would readily agree for an interview. But on a rainy day when he was driven indoors at the JN Stadium in Chennai, he did sit down for a long chat on the sidelines of the Inter-state athletics competition. He spoke about the diminishing returns by the 4x400m men and women teams, how they are in the process of complete overhaul and rebuilding.

Competing in Open Nationals next month is mandatory for athletes to get selected in relay teams (4x100 and 4x400) and there will be no other trials. He has lent his weight behind 400m foreign coach from Jamaican Jason Dawson, who had faced allegations of pushing players too hard. He said there is not tiff between any foreign or Indian coaches and after Dawson wanted to train athletes alone he was not given an assistant coach.

The chief coach said India would be concentrating on their strong events like javelin, long jump, 4x400 men and women relays for the Olympics. Excerpts:

On the recent poor run of the 4x400m relay teams

The problem between men and women, they are already training there in Trivandrum, but some of the athletes like Amoj got injured yesterday, then Rajesh Ramesh was also injured. He just rehabilitated and is coming back. Then Vishal was there. I think there are some athletes we expected will do good but they are lagging behind like Rihan Choudhury, Mohit (Kumar). We were expecting they will give good results during their training in the off-season, but when they started the season, they are not performing well. So, surely it is a new team.

There will be hardly anybody from the old group. Ajmal also just joined back after an injury in Saudi Arabia. Definitely they will be good but to win the gold medal at the next Asian Games. That is the expectation.