Athletes can break 800m record with hard work: Rajkumar

KUALA KUBU BARU: National record holder in the 800m run, B. Rajkumar, is confident that Malaysian athletes can break his 32-year-old record set at the Asian Athletics Championships 1985 in Indonesia, with a lot of hard work.
He said it was not easy to break the record considering that the current training pattern for athletes in the country was different from the training that he had gone through for seven years, Bernama reports.
"There is a lot of potential (in our athletes) and I see the progress is there … but they need a proper guide in the middle-distance run. It is a long-term project of between six and 10 years before you can see the result.
"It is not just for one or two years' (project) and then you stop. It doesn't work that way," he said at the Merdeka Kuala Kubu 21km Road Relay 2017.
Rajkumar, 52, was commenting on the inability of national athletes to beat the record until today, even at the recent 2017 Kuala Lumpur SEA Games (KL2017).
He said the new athletes could break his time of 1 minute and 47.37 seconds in the 800m just like how Khairul Hafiz Jantan broke the 42-year-old record by Tan Sri Dr M. Jegathesan in the 200m.
"Frankly, if someone wants to break this record, I think you need to wait for the next big plan in track and field, especially in the middle-distance run," he said.
The Kuala Kubu Baru-born man said he was proud of the achievements of young athletes in athletics who displayed excellent performance in the SEA Games but they needed international exposure.
"Efforts at all levels are needed to bring back the glory days of athletics," he said, adding that the 21km road relay was the best platform to unearth new talents.
Over 300 participants took part in the event, a brainchild of Rajkumar himself, to vie for the cash prizes totalling RM12,000.
For the record, Vietnam's Duong Van Thai won the men's 800m final at the recent KL SEA Games with a time of 1 minute and 48.97 seconds. — Bernama