The opening day of 14th National Youth Athletics Championship, which commenced on Friday at the G.M.C. Balayogi Stadium in Gachibowli, witnessed national youth records being bettered in two events.
When the first day’s proceedings unfolded in the morning in girls 3000m Seema, Himachal Pradesh’s petite distance runner from Dharamsala, erased Kerala girl Anumol Thampi’s meet and national mark of 10:00.22 by clocking a noteworthy 9 minutes 56.25 seconds. Maharashtra’s Poonam Sonune (10:02.14) and U.P. girl Amrita Patel (10:04.85) clinched the other two medals.
In boys 3000m race Delhi lad Raj Shekhar, who won the boys’ race with a timing of 8:42.93, missed the world youth qualifying mark (8:42.00) narrowly.
In the evening, Punjab sprinter Gurindervir Singh provided a stunner by setting the national record in boys’ 100m final as he clocked 10.74 seconds. His time bettered Praveen Muthukumaran’s six year old mark by just 1/100th of a second. Delhi’s Ch. Palender Kumar pushed him hard and finished second with another noteworthy 10.80s.
Gurvindervir equalled the winning time of Huang Yonglian in the Chinese youth nationals that ended in Nanchang on Thursday and that revealed his medal ambitions in the forthcoming Asian Youth Championships at Bangkok, Thailand, next month.
As expected Bengal’s Rajashree Prasad won the girls’ 100m in 12.33 secs. Earlier this year Rajashree clocked 12.17 seconds to win the National School Games title at Pune.
Meanwhile, Haryana throwers ruled the day by dishing out best performances to prove their mettle, starting with discus thrower Abhay Gupta in the morning. He hurled the disc to a stupendous 58.80m that pushed teammate and favourite Sahil Silwal (53.74m) to the sidelines. In shot put, Mohit heaved the iron ball to 19.01m for the top spot in the absence of national youth record-holder Dipender Dabas (20.63m) who is also the event leader in Asian youth ranking last season.
Tamil Nadu javelin thrower N. Hemamalini unleashed the spear to 44.03m to retain the numero uno position. However, it is lesser than her best of 45.26m from the last season. In long jump, her teammate R. Punitha took the top spot with 5.75m.
