Caption: Brunei (R) on the podium at the 79th Singapore Open Track & Field Championships. Picture: Courtesy of national athletics team
Ak Fauzi Pg Salleh
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN
THE national sprint team won bronze and set a new national record in 4x100m relay event at the 79th Singapore Open Track and Field Championships yesterday.
Md Fakhri Ismail, Md Noor Firdaus Ar-Rasyid Hj Mohd Idris, Md Faizul Abdullah and Abd Rahim Abdullah recorded a time of 40.92s at the Sports Hub Stadium in Singapore bettering the previous time of 40.95s recorded at the 28th Southeast (SEA) Games two years ago.
Thailand won the event on 40.27s while Singapore were runners-up 0.07s behind.
National athletics coach Azmize Abd Rahman believes that the achievement could earn his team the ticket to this year's SEA Games in August in Kuala Lumpur.
"We have achieved our target... which was to break the national record in the 4x100m relay event," said athletics coach Azmize Abd Rahman in an interview with BruSports yesterday.
"I believe that this team deserve a place in the SEA Games in August... they have proven in this tournament that they can compete against the best teams in the region.
"We will go back home and train even harder... we will also analyse their perfomance and try to improve on it," added the coach.
Md Fakhri, who had just recently recovered from a lower back injury felt good chemistry among the members in the relay team but he thought that he could have done better.
"We had a good teamwork... there was a slight hitch at the start of the race but we managed to pick up and went on to finish third," said the Rio Olympian.
"I just recently returned from injury and this is not the performance that I expected, I feel that I can do better, but I am very happy with my progress so far and we just need to work extra harder now," added Fakhri who holds the 100m national record with a time of 10.59s set during the previous SEA Games in 2015.
Fakhri and Md Noor Firdaus Ar-Rasyid also managed to progress into the top-16 of the men's 100m event.
The latter won Final B on 10.71s while Fakhri placed third with a time of 10.85s.
