APNG issues Olympics selection process

ATHLETICS PNG (APNG) has issued its selection policy for the Tokyo Olympic Games, seeking to explain how its athletes will be selected.
The process has changed somewhat from previous Olympic Games where APNG had always enjoyed a minimum quota of two athletes — a male and female — under the Universality Rule.
Now there is only one universality place available in athletics, which can be either a male or female.
However if for example a female athlete qualifies either by achieving an automatic qualifying time or distance, or by securing a place through the new world ranking system then APNG will still have a universality place for a male athlete.
“How it will work this time is that if no one qualifies by right to enter the Games we can select one athlete,” president Tony Green said.
“This will be done by reference to world rankings and we will nominate to the PNG Olympic Committee the athlete with the highest overall world ranking. If that athlete happens to be a field event athlete then they would still need to be approved by World Athletics.”
He said under the universality rules, entries were only accepted automatically for sprints, middle distance and hurdle events. For long distance events and field event athletes World Athletics would consider the performance standard of the athlete and would only accept those who would be competitive.
He said qualifying automatically was getting more difficult and the women’s 100m mark was now 11.15 seconds, compared to 11.32 for Rio 2016 and 11.38 for London 2012.
“Toea Wisil’s best ever performance is 11.29 secs which she has achieved on two occasions – once in 2016 and again in 2017.
However World Athletics have allocated a total of 56 places for the 100m so if for argument’s sake 30 athletes run 11.15 or better and a handful of places are allocated to universality athletes then that could mean say 20 athletes securing a place through the world ranking.”
Green said jumper Rellie Kaputin, who had an outstanding Oceania Championships in June last year, would miss the big competitions in Australia next month and in March due to an injury she sustained in August.
He said Wisil would attend a series of meets in Australia and New Zealand over the next few weeks before heading to Nanjing, China, for the World Indoor Championships where she would run the 60m dash.