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| Tuesday, 10 August 2004 |
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Cooray promises to give of his best Dinesh Weerawansa reporting from Greece ATHENS, Monday. - Sri Lanka's champion long distance runner, Anuradha Indrajith Cooray said his aim at the Athens Olympic will be to come out with his personal best. Cooray said it would be a tough task but promised to give of his best. Cooray, one of the three competitors in the Sri Lanka contingent from Sri Lanka Army, has been working hard over the past few months on schedules drawn up by his coach and former team manager Brigadier Parry Liyanage. The presence of Cooray brings back memories of former Sri Lanka veteran marathon runner K.A. Karunaratne who ompeted in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. But the unfamiliar conditions in Europe may affect Cooray. But the lad is determined to make the maximum use of the opportunity he got and come out at least with his personal best. Sri Lanka's eight-member contingent is scheduled to start their training sessions from tomorrow. Besides Cooray, the other athletes in the team are Damayanthi Darsha (women's 400m), Rohan Pradeep Kumara Fernando (men's 400m), Manjula Kumara Wijesekera (men's high jump) and the overall captain Susanthika Jayasinghe (women's 100m). For Paul Kibii Tergat, the world's fastest marathon runner, Athens will definitively form the climax or anti-climax of his illustrious international athletics career which has spanned more than a decade, as 2004 will be his last Olympics. "I have every type of trophy in my cabinet, except an Olympic gold medal. This should indicate to you how important I am taking the Games in Athens," said Tergat, 34, a sergeant in the Kenya Air Force. Sri Lanka athletes will get an opportunity to get familiarise to the conditions here as the track and field game proper would only commence next Wednesday (18). Sydney Olympics medallist Susanthika Jayasinghe will have 11 days to train here before her women's 100m qualifying round event scheduled to be worked off on August 20 from 10.50 a.m. All in all, there will be a total of nine heats for women's 100m, the glamour event which would determine the fastest woman of the Athens Olympiad. But there would be greater expectations on the South Asian Games gold medallist, Manjula Kumara Wijesekera looks forward to make it to the finals of men's high jump event. Wijesekera targets to clear over 2.27m, which should give him a berth in the finals. Meanwhile, Xanthi Konstantinidou, coach of the Greek National Women's squad, said she had virtually made her final team selections for the opening match against the USA at Pankritio Stadium against USA on Wednesday. After today's training session she said: "On Wednesday we face a team which, objectively, is better than us. "We are trying to find a way to put a halt on its attacking line." The coach added that she was still considering several positional options within the Greek side. In diving, Germany is aiming for at least two medals in the Athens. Their national head coach Lutz Buschkow said expectations are high for the synchronised 10m Platform European Champions, Nora Subschinski and Annett Gamm, while the coach also picked out the likes of Ditte Kotzain, Heike Fischer and Heiko Meyer as medal prospects. "During the World Cup here in February we won two medals, so our goal is to at least win two medals in the Olympic competitions," said BUSCHKOW during the team's practice session at the Olympic Aquatic Centre. "But the athletes are not concentrating on medals, they are concentrating on their performance. If they perform their best, the results will come," he said. With 11 members in the German Diving team, along with the USA and China, has the largest number of competitors in the Athens 2004 Olympic Diving competition. The diving competition begins on Saturday. |
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