The results of the women’s long jump contest of the Spanish Championships that are held in the Valencian town of Torrent are on hold, after detecting “an error in the indirect measurement systems”, according to the Spanish Athletics Federation (RFEA). .
“At the end of the women’s long jump test, the electronic indirect measurement system used in the final was verified as part of the usual procedure,” the Federation explained in a statement.
“During the verification process,” the note continues, “an error has been detected in the indirect measurement systems, which affect the jumps made by the athletes from the fourth round of jumps until the end of the contest.”
Precisely the rounds in which the best jumps came from the contest that crowned the young jumper from Álava Tessy Ebosele as the new Spanish champion with a mark of 7.09 windy metres, ahead of María Vicente who hung the silver with a jump of 7.02 also favored by the wind.
The podium was completed by Fátima Diame who won the bronze medal with a best attempt of 6.94 meters, this time, with legal wind.
All of these brands are now on hold until the investigation carried out by the Spanish Athletics Federation concludes, which detected “an upward deviation of up to 20 centimeters” in relation to the actual measurements.
“The detected error affects all the jumps equally, with an upward deviation of 20 cm between the real measurements and those that have been given as official during the competition,” the Federation indicated.
Failure that, as the RFEA explained in its note, was caused by “a slight displacement of the measurement station involuntarily by a person outside the organization.”
“The regulation establishes that in a situation like the one that occurred, the measurement system must be recalibrated again, but both the operator of the measurement station and the jump judge considered that it was not necessary to do so and that is why it was not detected this measurement error during the test”.
The Spanish Athletics Federation will open “an investigation procedure to analyze the causes of this error and verify the validity of the real measurement of the jumps, always adjusting to the provisions of the World Athletics competition regulations.”
For this reason, “the official results of the test will be published once this investigation process is finished,” concluded the RFEA, which “regretted” what happened and “apologised” to the athletes affected and to all the parties involved, while at the same time He assured that all the necessary measures will be adopted “to guarantee that this type of error does not happen again.”
