Gaborone — Local elite track stars will face a steep uphill battle to reach the Beijing 2027 World Athletics Championships after the global governing body unveiled a new qualification system.
With the mandatory time for the country’s signature men’s 400m race plunging to a blistering 44.45 seconds, athletics coach, Justice Dipeba has warned that local athletes will face unprecedented structural hurdles under a system that inherently favours competitors with access to elite European circuits.
Under the newly approved system, athletes in individual events can qualify in one of four ways. They can achieve the entry standard during the qualification period, secure a top finishing position at designated major competitions, earn a wild card or rely on their world rankings position at the close of the respective ranking period.
For the 2027 edition, World Athletics aims to have approximately 40 per cent of athletes qualify through automatic entry standards, with the remaining 60 per cent filling the fields via world rankings.
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Compared to the previous World Championships held in Tokyo, Japan, the Beijing standards represent a significant leap in difficulty.
In the men’s 400m, the automatic entry standard has plummeted from 44.85 seconds down to that 44.45-second mark. The women’s 400m standard has similarly dropped from 50.75 seconds to an even 50.00 seconds.
The story is the same across the short sprints. The men’s 100m standard has been cut from 10.00 seconds to 9.95 seconds while the 200m has dropped from 20.16 seconds to 20.07 seconds.
Middle-distance runners face an equally daunting challenge. In the men’s 800m, the qualifying time has been lowered from 1:44.50 down to 1:43.00, while the women’s 800m standard moved from 1:59.00 down to 1:57.50.
Athletics pundits note that the shift was necessitated by the rapid evolution of track and field, with athletes consistently recording historically fast times.
Coach Dipeba confirmed in an interview that the standards were extremely tough across the board, not just in the short sprints.
He highlighted the men’s 800m standard of 1:43.00 as a particularly daunting mark, noting that athletes would need to run the races of their lives just to qualify automatically.
“If you look at the 2024 Olympic finals, all eight athletes ran under 10 seconds in the 100m. Nowadays, athletes in the 400m are running 43-second times early in the season. I think those are the things World Athletics looked at. They want the championships to be highly competitive and athletes are simply running decent times nowadays,” Dipeba said.
He explained why the new system put African and local countries at a distinct disadvantage when it came to qualifying via the world rankings route.
He said the ranking system mostly favoured high-tier continental meets, which were scarce in Africa.
He added that because many meets held on the African continent offered low ranking points, and many African athletes lacked financial backing or visas to access elite European circuits, the hill became much steeper to climb.
“It is going to be a steep hill for us to be able to achieve the standard in terms of ranking. It means we have to accumulate more points and you need to run in high-quality meets to get those better points to improve your ranking,” he said.
Given how high the automatic standards have been set, Dipeba foresees a majority of the world’s athletes ultimately relying on the ranking system to make it to Beijing, making the battle for continental meet upgrades in Africa more urgent than ever.
BOPA