India’s Ram Baboo clocked a personal best of 1:20:00 in the Dudinska 50m in Slovakia on Saturday to reach the qualifying standard for the men’s 20km race at the Paris Olympics. Babu, the 35-kilometer race walking bronze medalist at the Hangzhou Asian Games, finished third in the gold-level event of the race walking tour. This is the first time an Indian athlete has reached the podium in this competition. The deadline to qualify for the Olympics is 1 hour, 20 minutes and 10 seconds.

Cesar Rodriguez of Peru won the championship in 1 hour, 19 minutes and 41 seconds, and Brian Pintado of Ecuador came in second in 1 hour, 19 minutes and 44 seconds. name.

The 24-year-old Baboo is also the seventh male pacer from the country to cross the above eligibility criteria, the others being: Akshdeep Singh, Suraj Panwar, Servin Sebastian, Arshpreet Singh, Pramjeet Bisht and Vikas Singh.

Priyanka Goswami remains the only female race walker to qualify for the quadrennial event, a feat she achieved at last year’s National Open Race Walking Championships in Jharkhand.

However, a country can only send three athletes to the Olympics in individual athletics events and it will now be up to the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) to decide who among the seven race walkers will qualify for the Paris Games.

Head track and field coach Radhakrishnan Nair has said the final selection may be made in June.

Regardless, qualifying for the Olympics is a huge step for Barb, who overcame poverty growing up.

Baboo, the son of a daily wage earner, works as a waiter to finance his sports training and joins his father in road construction work under the MGNREGA scheme during the Covid-19 lockdown as his family is financially strapped.

He initially ran the marathon, 10,000 meters and 5,000 meters, but developed knee pain.

On the advice of local coach Pramod Yadav, he later switched to race walking, which would not put too much pressure on his knees.

He initially started with a 50km race walk, but switched to the 35km race walk after World Athletics removed the 35km race walk from its events.

Baboo ultimately moved to the 20km event because medal contention in the mixed team event takes into account the combined times of a country’s male and female competitors, making it difficult to predict.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)