The field athlete said he had to use 28cm spikes provided by Puma instead of the usual 26cm. "I am not trying to look for excuses. It was a terrible performance by my standards. But there were some contributing factors, which can be corrected," he said.
"I struggled with the spikes really. The 7.77m I did at the World Championships was far from my average performance. I could certainly do much better than that," said the athlete who has been jumping well over 8m in recent months. He added that he cannot put the blame on spikes only because several factors contributed to his poor performance. "I feel we should have left here for Japan much earlier than we did. We had a late departure, which took its toll on all of us. Everybody in the team seemed to struggle adapting to the Japan environment. The seven-hour time difference created problems for everybody because we could only go to sleep at 4am but we were expected to warming up on the track by 8am. It was difficult. It was common during the competition to see every one of us dozing on the bus on our way to the track," Garenamotse said.
However, the 2002 and 2006 Commonwealth Games silver medallist said what happened in Japan was a good lesson. He hoped that the team would leave as early as possible for the Olympics in China next year to acclimatise.
