Unhappy with her time, Priyanka pulls out

Image of the Eiffel Tower from the 2024 Paris Olympics tattooed on her left arm, two-time Olympian race walker Priyanka Goswami was the cynosure of all eyes until she opted to pull out midway during the women’s 20km event of the 12th Indian Open Race Walk Competition here on Saturday. The national record holder was expected to dominate the race, with an eye on achieving the Asian Athletics Championships qualification time of 1 hour and 32 minutes, but pulled out due to a “stomach catch”.

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“I was fit... I think it’s due to the water intake. It’s mainly due to a stomach catch and not any injury,” she said. “I did complete in a 35km race walk event last month. Maybe, because of recovery issues it happened today.”

Priyanka said after tracking her progress during the race she realised she was going to fail to achieve her timing target. “I trained hard, but my race was slow today. As I tracked my time, I was nowhere near achieving the qualifying mark. Completing the race in this heat could have troubled my future events, so I opted to come out,” she said.

Priyanka’s national record is 1:28:45, achieved in 2021 in Ranchi. Earlier this year, she also improved the national 35km race walk record to 2:56:34 in Slovakia.

When asked about the conditions here, the Olympian said, “Last time, it (the event) was held in January or February, it was an ideal time for such an event. Even today, the weather was pleasant during the men’s event... but the sun came shining during the women’s event. I was not confident of achieving my target and I opted out.”

While sharing her Olympics experience, Priyanka said that her performance in the Tokyo Games was way better than in Paris. In the 2021 Olympics, she finished 17th in the 20km race walk event with a timing of 1:32:36. However, in the last edition, she finished 41st out of 45 contestants. Priyanka is India’s second race walking medallist at the Commonwealth Games — she won the 10,000m silver at 2022 Birmingham.

She also talked about hardships in race walking. “It’s a different sport, completely different from other athletics events. We rely more on conditions, the recovery process and have limited scope of jumping to other events.”