Day: July 29, 2023

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INDIA TO HOST IAU 50K WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP

It will be the first IAU world championship to be held in India

Athletes and officials assembled in Bengaluru for the IAU 100km Asia & Oceania Championship (Photo: Shyam, G Menon)

India will host its first world championship under the auspices of the International Association of Ultrarunners (IAU) in November this year.

“ It will be the 50k world championship and will be held in Hyderabad,’’ Dr Nadeem Khan, president, IAU said in Bengaluru on Saturday (July 29, 2023). As yet IAU championships held in India have spanned 24 hours and 100k and been in the Asia-Oceania championship category.

Dr Khan was in the city in connection with the IAU 100km Asia & Oceania Championship, which gets underway on Sunday (July 30). The event – it is the first IAU 100k championship being held in India – is scheduled to take place on a five kilometre-loop at the GKVK (Gandhi Krishi Vigyana Kendra) campus. The championship was formally declared open at a ceremonial function, Saturday evening.

Nao Kazami (Photo: Shyam G Menon)
Haruki Okayama (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

The event has participants from Australia, Chinese Taipei, New Zealand, Japan, Mongolia and India. It is being held in association with the IAU, Athletics Federation of India and is being organised by NEB Sports. The presence of Japan and Australia add to the competition on show. Of the top five male athletes ranked as per their personal best, the top four are from Japan and one, from Australia. This includes former world record holder Nao Kazami of Japan, who has a PB of six hours, nine minutes and 14 seconds for the 100k. Expected to give him tight competition is his teammate, Haruki Okayama (6:12;10). All the aforementioned five athletes have sub-seven-hours PBs. Going into the race, the composition of the top five ranked according to their PBs was the same for women with the top four hailing from Japan and one from Australia. The best PB among women belonged to Miho Nakata (7:19:12).   

The previous edition of the 100km Asia and Oceania Championship was held in Jordan in 2019. In 2022, the 100km World Championships were held at Bernau-Berlin where India’s Vipul Kumar and Jyoti Gawate set new national bests (7:04:00 and 8:20:00) in the distance. Both Jyoti and Vipul are part of the Indian team running at Bengaluru on Sunday (July 30, 2023).

The Indian team with IAU president, Dr Nadeem Khan (far right), race director Nagaraj Adiga (second from left) and others (Photo: Latha Venkatraman)

“ The hosting of IAU 100 km Asia & Oceania Championship will give us visibility and reach in ultrarunning,” a related press release said quoting Dr Rajender Kataria, an IAS officer and president of the local organizing committee of the championship in Bengaluru. “ The championship coming to India is a culmination of several years of hard work. We are very excited to bring this event to India and appreciate the fact that this will further elevate the sport in the country,” the release said quoting Dr Khan.

India will be represented by ten ultrarunners – four women and six men. They are Vipul Kumar, Binay Sah, Saurav Kumar Ranjan, Nishu Kumar, Amar Singh Devanda, Karthik Joshi, Jyoti Gawate, Gunjan Khurana, Shashi Mehta and Aparna Choudhary.

(The authors, Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon, are independent journalists based in Mumbai.)