The 58th National Inter-State Senior Athletics Championships (NISSAC) will now be held at the Sarusajai Sports Complex in Guwahati.
The championship will be held from June 26-29.
The championship will be the final selection trial for Indian athletes for the 18th Asian Games to be held in Jakarta, Indonesia from August 18 to September 2.
The decision to prepone the inter-state meet earlier scheduled to be held in July in Kolkata was taken by the members of AFI planning commission and national coaches in Patiala on Sunday.
AFI Deputy Chief Coach, Radhakrishnan Nair said, “The last date for sending final entries to the organizing committee for Asian Games is June 30. And that is the reason we had to prepone it by a month. The competition will serve as the final selection trials for the Asian Games 2018,”
“We also felt the need to relax the qualifying standards in some of the events due to rescheduling of the competition and it has been done. We are confident that at Jakarta Asian Games, we will win more number of medals as compared to 2014 Incheon Asian Games,” said Nair, reports Business Standard.
The deputy chief coach also informed that starting from May, Indian athletes training at different national camps will depart in groups for training abroad. “All the athletes including those who went for Commonwealth Games 2018 joined the camps soon after they returned to India. Training will now continue abroad and most teams will be back by the second week of June before the inter-state competition,” said the coach.