Senior Sports Reporter
HEAD of the national event coaches team for middle and long-distance runners, Benson Chauke, believes with necessary support and exposure, local athletes have the potential to qualify for major competitions.
Chauke was recently appointed head of national event coaches team for middle and long-distance runners.
He will be working with four other coaches — Collen Makaza, Cephas Pasipamire, Zibusiso Nyoni and Cuthbert Nyasango.
They will be in charge of a 15-member team of athletes set to go for a two-week training camp in Vumba this month.
The camp is part of a programme by the National Athletics Association of Zimbabwe to try and assist athletes with the potential to qualify for major events such as the World Athletics Championships and the Olympics.
Zimbabwe usually have marathon runners qualifying for the Olympics but it was a different case for the Tokyo 2020 Games, as local athletes failed to qualify.
The qualifying time was 2 hours 11 minutes 30 seconds for men and 2 hours 29 minutes 30 seconds for women.
These are the same qualifying standards for the forthcoming World Championships in July.
Chauke said the camp is part of a process they are hoping will turn the fortunes for Zimbabwe in the future.
Chauke and Makaza met some of the athletes on Sunday after competing in the Mr Pace Chitungwiza cross-country event.
“We want to come up with people that need to be supported, those that can really make the times, those that wanted for the World Championships qualifiers and those times are pretty fast times.
“We have put in place a training camp where we are going to bring all these people together and take them for competition.
“But we also wanted to hear from the athletes (Sunday), their major concerns, where they are, if they had other plans that they had made prior to the announcement of the camp. That information we hadn’t had a chance to collect from them.
“So yesterday, I was listening to their concerns, challenges, consulting so that they take ownership of this whole project because it’s not a once-off project. It’s going to be, probably, a three-year project and by then we should be getting results,” said Chauke.
Besides, interacting with the athletes, the cross-country event gave them a platform to assess some of them in a competition set-up.
“We were impressed. Some of them, their level of fitness is good. For (Munyaradzi) Jari to run 31 minutes on a cross-country course it was positive, it means the fitness level is there considering the obstacles, it’s quite brilliant and very promising.
“So those are the little things we wanted to see just to assess . . . Our aim is for them to run fast, the faster we run, the better the time, the slower we run, the slower the time,” said Chauke.
He noted that there is need to take into account the fact that for the past two years, there hasn’t been much activity because of Covid-19.
For the upcoming World Championships, some of the athletes that have posted promising times are Isaac Mpofu, Ngonidzashe Ncube and Jari.
Chauke also underscored the importance of competing in top marathon races where athletes stand a better chance of running qualifying times and said they are also going to engage managers who have connections to such road races so that they can work together.
“We want to look at how best we can get our people to get such connections so that as we work with them, they get that external exposure,” said Chauke.
Chauke worked with Cuthbert Nyasango, who, in 2012, finished seventh at the Olympic Games in London, England.