Irish athletes to discover target marks for London Games today

ATHLETICS:IRISH ATHLETES will today discover exactly how difficult qualification will be for next year's London Olympics. The IAAF concluded their council meeting in Daegu, South Korea, yesterday, where one of the items on the agenda was the final agreement on the qualifying standards for London 2012, and these will be distributed to all national governing bodies of the sport around lunchtime today.

These are expected to largely mirror the qualifying times for the World Championships in Daegu this summer, although with a few possible alterations. What is certain, at least for now, is the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) will be accepting only A-standards.

This was announced in February in the nomination and selection criteria document for London, agreed with Athletics Ireland – and stated that “only A-standards as agreed by the International Olympic Committee/IAAF will be acceptable”, and, crucially, “the parties agree that they shall not nominate any individual or team eligible to compete . . . unless he/she/they” have achieved the A-standard.

This would appear to rule out any repeat of the controversial decision to add three B-standard athletes just before the cut-off for the Beijing Olympics, in 2008.

But in the meantime at least Irish athletes will know exactly what they need to do to make London next year, which in many cases will mean breaking personal bests or indeed national records.

Also already agreed is the London 2012 qualification period, which will begin on May 1st of this year, and conclude on July 8th 2012 (with the exception of the walks and marathon, where qualification began last January 1st).

On that basis, 20km walkers Robert Heffernan and Olive Loughnane have already secured likely qualifying times in recent weeks, although based on times from last summer, only Paul Hession (200 metres), David Gillick (400 metres), Colin Griffin (50km walk), Derval O’Rourke (100 metres hurdles) and Fionnuala Britton (3,000 metres steeplechase) would have achieved A-standards.

The official standards for London come just in time for Alistair Cragg and Mark Kenneally, who are both seeking to secure the marathon standard, likely to be two hours and 16 minutes, in their debuts at the distance this weekend.

Cragg runs the Boston marathon on Monday with every chance of running under 2:16, given he clocked 60 minutes 49 seconds for the half marathon in New York last month, while Kenneally runs Sunday’s Vienna marathon also looking to secure the coveted time for London.