Lack of exposure hurting 4x100m team: India head coach James Hillier

CHENNAI: The performance at the recent World Athletics Relays turned out to be underwhelming, with none of the five Indian teams securing qualification for next year’s World Championships. What was concerning were the poor baton exchanges, which resulted in the men’s 4x100m team being disqualified in the second round. The Indian 4x100m head coach James Hillier expressed that the lack of experience competing at the big stage is one of the reasons for the below-par show. “We did not put a single baton down in training. You have to be realistic with these guys as they were competing in a high pressure situation. They (most) have not even been overseas, let alone competing at the World meet and the standard was so high,” Hillier, who is also the athletics director at Reliance, said on the sidelines of the Indian Athletics Series 6 here.“What we now have to do is not chastise the people that made mistakes but look at what happened and what we can do to fix it. The experience at World Relays will benefit us for the Asian Games,” he added.With experienced athletes like Manikanta Hoblidar and Amlan Borgohain not being part of the squad due to injuries, Tamilarasu’s injury during the World Relays made matters even worse. “Due to Tamilarasu’s injury, I had to bring in Harsh Raut. Harsh had never run a relay in his life, so the first relay he ran was at the World Relays. We need to build and develop a junior relay programme and create a relay culture. We only started this project last year.”The sprint team will now head to Saudi Arabia this week to compete in both individual and relay events.