Pakistan’s only hope, Olympian athlete Mehboob Ali, was disqualified by the Meet judge after a video recording showed him breaking his lane despite having the best time in the 400m semi-final at Indoor Athletic Track wherein Pakistan added four more bronze medals to the overall tally of 8 medals in 5th Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games being played at various venues here Tuesday.
Soon after receiving disqualification call from the Meet Judge, the Pakistani official present on this occasion submitted a request to the jury of appeal who after analyzing the report of the Lane Judge and call from the Meet Judge, declared Mehboob Ali as disqualified on Tuesday morning.
Mehboob was unlucky because he recorded the best time of both the semi-final 47.73sec beating his own 48.20sec during the heat qualification. It was also assessed thoroughly if Mehboob did this deliberately or it happened by mistake. In the report, he was not penalised as it happened mistakenly and thus only called him disqualified.
When contacted, Athletic Federation Pakistan (AFP) President Major Gen (r) Akram Sahi and AFP Secretary General Muhammad Zafar, they also clarified that it happens mistakenly so Mehboob Ali was disqualified only instead of penalizing.
After Mehboob, Maria Maratab could not make it in the triple jump with her distance of 11.96m and was far behind from the fellow competitors while Najma Perveen got 6th position in the heat by finishing her 60m sprint in 8.11sec. Shahbaz also failed to impress with his lost in the semi-final of the Men’s 60m sprint, taking fifth position with his time 7.5sec. He qualified the heat with the clock showing 7.03sec before the semi-finals.
The most impressive match was played for former World No 2, three times Asian silver medalist and two times World Cup silver medalist Sajjad, who defeated his rival Rayad Nahar by 5-4 in Men’s 6 Red Snooker Singles in best of nine frames. Sajjad dominated the match right in the start.
Muhammad Sajjad (Pak) beat Rayad Nahar (Jordan) 5-4, (55-07, 02-56, 09-75(44), 44-21, 28-34, 78-0, 79, 08-60, 41-01) and Bilal (Pak) beat Binh Nguyen (Vietnam) 5-0, the score (30-05, 36-20, 40-05, 41-12, 35-11).
Pakistani players gave a stunning performance in the newly introduced discipline ‘Belt Wrestling’ winning three medals when Benish Khan in 70kg weight, Maryum in 50kg weight and Basit in 100kg weight grabbed bronze medals. Benish Khan recorded the victory against Maria Seduniva of Tajikistan on point 3-0 and in the medal fight lost to Nasiba Tukh of Uzbekistan on points.
After Benish Khan won the bronze medal, Maryum also bagged bronze medal in the -50kg as she lost to Lecun Badaglyyewa of Turkmenistan. Maryum did not have any supporters against Lecun who received thundering applause from the jam-packed sitting spectators.
Besides these three medalists winner, all the other nine players of Pakistan could not make it to the last round and they were either ousted in the first round or in the second round.
Arshad Sattar, officials of the Belt Wrestling, expressed his dissatisfaction over the result and said that the boys and girls should have won medals as the expectations were very high. He said that the discipline was still going on until September 23 and more medals were expected.
Pakistan has finished with Ju-jitsu event with one gold, two silver and three bronze medals by adding one bronze on Tuesday when Jehanzeb Rashid Lone in the Na-Waza -56kg weight grabbed the bronze medal after handing an upsetting defeat to Konyssov Kuandyk of Kazakhstan and Shari Pou Firdous of Tajikistan before losing a crunch match to Alfadhli Omer of United Arab Emirates.
Turkmenistan led the medal table with the tally of 33 gold, 23 silver and 17 bronze medals, followed by Iran with five gold, three silver and 13 bronze medals, Thailand with four gold, seven silver and 9 bronze, Kazakhstan with 4 gold, four silver and 8 bronze medals. Pakistan slipped to 14th position with one gold, two silver and nine bronze medals, behind, Uzbekistan, UEA, China, Philippines, Korea, India, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, and Vietnam.
