A record turnout of participants and a malfunction in the automatic timing system saw threw the Pentathlon Swimming Championships 2014 out of schedule drawing to a close late in the evening at the Sugathadasa Stadium yesterday.
A total of 613 swimmers comprising 347 male and 266 female athletes compared to a total of 470 athletes last year. The Pentathlon Swimming Championships which is the first event after the holiday season tests the capability of the athletes to perform all five events with the total time determining their rankings within the age groups.
Mahamaya College, Kandy won the girls overall championships with 24 points while Hans Moribo Swimming Club and Visakha Vidyalaya emerged joint runners-up. The boys championships was won by St. Joseph’s College with 25.5 points with Trinity College, Kandy as runners-up scoring 14 points. According to the Education Ministry regulations only children 13 years and above are given placings and thus the overall championships was determined only from Under 15, Under 17 and Under 20 age groups. Swimmers Under 13 are only certified whether they attain the minimum qualifying standard.
“Although we closed entries on the 2nd of May, entries were received by post up until the 7th of May. Since we don’t deprive the athletes on this technicality we were not able to reschedule the events to cope with the unexpectedly large number of entries. The failure of the automatic timing system added to this meant that we had to go quite late in to the evening”, explained Akhry Ameer, General Secretary of SLASU on the delay.
The starting mechanism of the automatic timing system at the Sugathadasa Stadium gave way towards the end of the first day. Although technicians tried to rectify the fault late into the night, it could not be rectified resulting in the entire second day of events having to be conducted on manual stopwatches. When the automatic timing system is in use, the manual stopwatches are only used as a third back-up according to FINA rules.
This was the first event SLASU experienced an unusually lengthy programme since 2008 when its Novices Championships had a surge in participation. This event will be rescheduled to possibly a three-day programme next year according to meet officials.
A complete list of the results can be downloaded from this link.
