Archibald gets success in Texas despite the elements

May 02, 2021 Sports

By Calvin Chapman

Archibald during a winning leap at the AAG’s second development meet this year at the NTFC (Calvin Chapman photo).

Kaieteur News – National men’s 100m champion and long jump record holder, Emanuel Archibald, got a major boost in his Olympics qualifying hopes after an outstanding outing at the Texas Invitational Track & Field Meet at the Mike A. Myers Stadium at the University of Texas in the USA.
Archibald, in his first meet in the USA, won the men’s long jump final with a jump of 7.95m in unfavourable conditions which included heavy rain and negative wind assistance.
The star athlete that hails from Amelia’s Ward in Linden explained to Kaieteur Sport during an invited comment that it was a wonderful experience for him to be competing in the United States for the first time and that he was pleased to win his event but it wasn’t easy.
He highlighted that he was on his own and if he had his coach with him, he probably would’ve done better. Besides being alone in Texas, the young man highlighted that it was a lot of travelling and after arriving in the State that borders Mexico on Thursday, it was straight into competition on Friday when he won the men’s Long Jump but he is nevertheless grateful for high level competition.
Archibald that was ranked 30th in the world standings for men’s Long Jump has since dropped to 49th and he attributed that to the fact that he has not been getting to compete as much as he would like to. He also noted that from the three Athletics Association of Guyana (AAG) meets that he participated in this year and won, results from just two of those events have been updated on the World Athletics website.
However, he projects that he should return to somewhere around the top 35 but he needs to keep competing if he is going to break into the top 30 and solidify a chance of making it to the Tokyo Games.
Despite Archibald running consistently in the 10.2s region, he did not fare so well on Saturday as he failed to make it out of the men’s 100m heat with a time of 10.51s. The heat was won by American Chris Royster in 10.25 seconds.

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