Hard work paid off, says Sajan Prakash
Last week, Sajan Prakash was under pressure after the 19th International swimming meet in Belgrade.
Despite having the best Indian performance (1:56.95) in 200m butterfly, Sajan wasn’t happy, for he had missed the A cut for Tokyo Olympics.
Sajan only had one more meet in Rome to achieve the Olympic A standard qualification mark and he was feeling the heat.
Reworked strategy
Sajan reworked his strategy before the Rome meet with coach Pradeep Kumar. They analysed his Belgarde race, breaking it into smaller parts, and decided that Sajan needed to gain speed and distance in the early part of the race to qualify.
In Rome, Sajan then knew exactly what he had to do and paced his race well to qualify. He went fast in the first half of the race, clocking 25.99s for the first 50 metres and 55.56s for the 100m and finished the race in 1:56.38s. He had finally breached the qualifying mark of 1:56.48s which he has been chasing since 2019.
Sajan was a relieved man, and said his hard work in Dubai with coach Pradeep had paid off.
