WELL past the 11th hour, Chris Bennett and Nick Percy were yesterday among a cluster of extremely late callups into the British team for the forthcoming IAAF world championships in London after being handed a wild card by track and field’s governing body.
Bennett, a European Championship finalist in the hammer in Amsterdam last summer before venturing onward toward his Olympic debut, was among six additional UK competitors given special invites by the IAAF based on their world ranking, with the former Scottish champion currently nestled in 28th place following a throw of 75.72 metres that earned him victory in Germany last month.
Oklahoma-based Percy, who recently defended his British discus title, has also profited from the IAAF’s largesse. Seven days out from the opening night of the global showpiece, it means there will be a total of 16 Scots in an 87-strong Great Britain & Northern Ireland squads, bettering by one the Caledonian tally from last summer in Rio.
“It’s great there are so many of us here,” team captain Eilidh Doyle said. “It feels like we’ll all be backing one another and cheering all the Scots on. I remember coming into the team initially and there was only Lee McConnell and myself, with Andrew Lemoncello maybe on occasion. Now you’ve got guys like Chris who are making championship after championship. And even though we’re not all in the same place, you do get that sense of pride when you see someone doing well.”
With most of the British squad already in place at their training camp in Paris, Bennett is expected to stay put and train on home soil rather than making a late dash across the Channel. Also added were Meghan Beesley, who will join Doyle in the 400m hurdles, along with Rachel Wallander (shot), Ieuan Thomas (3000m steeplechase) and Alicia Barrett (100m hurdles).
Meanwhile, Olympic Games finalist Adam Gemili has criticised British Athletics for not giving him adequate time to prove his fitness ahead of London.
The former Chelsea apprentice, who came fourth in the 200 metres at Rio 2016, will only run in the 4x100 relay after he failed to recover sufficiently from a hamstring injury in time to impress at the trials. The selectors – citing “recent performances” and their own policy guidance - opted to hand his Anguilla-born rival Zharnel Hughes the third discretionary slot in the event rather than holding off on any decision with Gemili, who ran a speedy 100m in Mannheim last week, confessing the emotional ebbs and flows involved in an ultimately forlorn appeals process have hit him hard.
“This is worse than tearing your hamstring, worse than missing out on an Olympic medal,” he said. “This is a lot harder to cope with mentally. If I’d got fit after London then fine, I wasn’t capable but I know now that I’m fit and ready to go. It takes a lot of support from the people around you to keep you focu sed and committed to what you’re doing and to stay positive and make sure you try and salvage something from your season. It’s a home world champs and that doesn’t happen often and this is where particularly in the 200 when its so open can happen. The hardest thing is knowing that I could’ve done something.”
Instead, he claimed, a demand from senior figures at UKA that he compete at this month’s trials in Birmingham probably set him back. Ill-prepared to push himself so soon, he was outside the medals and with that, his case to oust Hughes – who was fifth at the 2015 world championships in Beijing – was fatally weakened.
His past record deserved more sympathy, he felt. But the 23-year-old may yet make the podium from a sprint relay grouping which, if it eradicates past mishaps, has every chance of challenging Jamaica and the USA. “I was very naïve to different things in the sport,” Gemili said. “But the opportunity is just to go and be part of this relay team and hopefully we can go win a medal and I believe we can challenge for gold.”
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