Sri Lanka’s Nilani Rathnayake has come within the striking distance of qualifying for the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games under the newly introduced World Ranking system.
The 29-year-old top long distance runner from Sri Lanka Army, is currently within the top 45 athletes who will be eligible to compete in the Women’s 3,000 metres steeplechase event.
The former schoolgirl from Sumana Balika Vidyalaya, Ratnapura is currently ranked 35th with a total of 1,180 points and has already set a new Sri Lanka record of 9:46:76 seconds while finishing fourth in the Asian Championships and sixth in the Asian Games.
The World Ranking system awards ‘performance score’ and takes into consideration the top five performances of each athlete and then consider its average as ranking points to rank athletes according to their event.
These performance scores will be tabulated corresponding to their achievements, plus bonus points added based on their position and rank of the competition.
World Athletics has ranked each competition, such as world events, area championships and National Championships and allocated different bonus points to those championships, rather than taking into account performances at a regular local event.
However, Nilani still has some hard work ahead of her and need to perform more consistently at the highest level if she is to book a direct qualification for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Her first major challenge will be the National Athletics Championship which is set to be worked off in December at the Mahinda Rajapaksa Sports Complex in Diyagama.
In fact, this year’s Athletics Nationals will be of great significance as only the top eight athletes of each event would be invited to participate.
In addition, this meet will also serve as a selection trial for the Olympic Games as the Olympic qualification period has been extended from December 31 to June 2021.
Meanwhile, the Athletics Association of Sri Lanka (AASL) is also planning to conduct a selection trial meet for all junior and senior athletes in October. The trial meet will be conducted in preparation for the 24th Asian Athletics Championships which will be held from May 20 to 23 in Hangzhou, China and the 4th Asian Youth (Under-18) Athletics Championships will be held in Kuwait in March.
However, this year’s All-Island Schools Games has been abandoned due to the Coronavirus pandemic, according to sources from the Ministry of Education.
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