Lankan olympic contingent leaves on Tuesday

Dinesh WEERASANSA

Sri Lanka contingent for the 2012 Olympic Games will leave for London on Tuesday. Led by national men’s badminton champion Niluka Karunaratne who will join his team in London, Sri Lanka contingent includes four competitors who have directly qualified to compete at the XXXth Olympiad.

Marathon runner Anuradha Indrajith Cooray is the senior most member of the Sri Lanka contingent, having competed at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece.

He qualified to run at the 2012 Olympic after his superb performance at the 2012 London marathon clocking two hours, 17 minutes and 50 seconds. Besides Cooray, the only other member in the Lankan contingent to London with previous experience is former women’s national badminton champion Thilini Jayasinghe. In 2008 Beijing Games, she became the first ever Sri Lankan woman shuttler to compete in the Olympics. Apart from Jayasinghe, Cooray and Karunaratne, the fourth Sri Lankan who makes it to London Olympics after gaining qualifying standards is rifle shooter Mangala Samarakoon.

Soldier Samarakoon, a gold medallist at both South Asian Games and South Asian Shooting Championships, will represent Sri Lanka at the 50m prone event. He narrowly missed a medal at the 16th Asian Games in Guangzhou, 2010, finishing fourth with a score of 592 points and also scored full 100 points in one round for the first time in his career.Three other Lankans have been fortunate enough to make their Olympic debut in London though wildcards. They are hurdler Sonali Christine Merril, swimmers Heshan Unamboowe and Reshika Udugampola.

Merrill, who is residing and training in the United States, made a dream debut for Sri Lanka at the 2011 Asian Championships in Kobe, Japan, winning women’s 400m hurdles bronze medal. She also represented Sri Lanka at the 2011 IAAF World Championships in Degu, South Korea.

Both Unamboowe and Udugampola have been training in Melbourne, Australia and won passage to London on universality places, formally known as wild card entries. Universality places are a secondary chance for qualification awarded to Olympic Committees whose athletes have shown a high performance competency and achieved the minimum requirements. Backstroke specialist Unamboowe is a recipient of an Olympic Solidarity Scholarship, awarded by the National Olympic Committee of Sri Lanka, which provided him an opportunity to train at the Nunawading Swimming Club in Melbourne.

His performances at the 14thFINA World Championships prompted the world aquatic sport governing body FINA to pick him for 2012 Olympic Games on universality places.

Swimmer Udugampola’s pet event is 100m freestyle and she has come a long way since beginning her career nine years ago. She has set several national records, representing Sri Lanka at the South Asian Games and also competed at two FINA World Championships.

Nevertheless, winning an Olympic medal will be a gigantic task for Sri Lanka, which has won only two silver medals in the entire 116-year-old modern summer Olympics.

The first Lankan to climb an Olympic victory podium was Duncan White who came second in men’s 400m hurdles at London Olympics in 1948.

It took another 52 years for Sri Lanka to break that Olympic hoodoo until woman sprinter Susanthika Jayasinghe won a medal in women’s 200m.

She initially finished third in her pet event at the Sydney 2000 Games but after American Jones was stripped off her gold medal after she was found guilty of taking performance enhancing drugs, Jayasinghe’s medal was elevated to a silver.

It is exactly a week away from the opening of the XXXth Olympic Games in London next Friday. Having visited over 1,000 communities around the United Kingdom and celebrated the achievements of over 7,000 torchbearers to date, the Olympic Torch Relay will see the flame carried by 982 torchbearers around 200 miles of the capital’s streets, on the final leg of its journey to London’s Olympic Stadium. The final day of the Olympic torch relay next Friday (27) will see18 torchbearers carry the flame, seven of whom will travel with it down the River Thames on Gloriana, the royal barge.

With only seven days to go until the Olympic flame the lights the cauldron at the Opening Ceremony it is great to see London ready to welcome the flame as the organizing committee (LOGOC) chaired by Olympic champion turned politician Sebastian Coe is working hard to make the London Games a huge success. Reports from London said that the British wet weather is threatening to put a dampener on the Olympic Games. Scientists has said that cloud-seeding, used around the world to prevent fog at airports, stop hail damage in cities or to boost snowfall at ski resorts, could well be the answer to overcome the gloomy weather. In 2008, China seeded clouds ahead of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony to create a downpour elsewhere and keep the stadium dry.

Firing rockets, packed with silver iodide crystals into rain clouds over the suburbs of Beijing, too was used in 2008.