Patiala: Machettira Raju Poovamma improved her personal best in 400m run with a splendid timing of 52.75 secs on the second day of Federation Cup Senior Athletics Championships here. Although she defended her title from last year’s meet which was held at the same venue, the 22-year-old woman from Mangalore expressed her disappointment for not making the World Championships qualification mark by just 4/100th of a second.
Kerala girl Anu Mariam Jose, who pushed Poovamma all the way could manage only 53.88 secs and settled with silver while her state-mate Anju Thoams garnered the bronze in 55.14s. Poovamma’s previous best was 52.94 secs which she clocked while winning the Asian Grand Prix at Bangkok last year.
Another athlete who successfully defended her title was Poovamma’s ONGC teammate Kushbir Kaur in 20 km walk. The meet and national record-holder (1:37:28) had a comfortable win on the familiar course with a time of 1:38:03. Rani Yadav, her nearest rival from Uttar Pradesh, completed the race four minutes after the winner.
Rajiv’s winning spree continues
The day witnessed three men failing to retain their gold from 2012, both on tracks. Kunhu Muhammed (400m) and Sajeesh Joseph (800m) finished second in their respective events after giving tough fight to the eventual winners Arokia Rajiv and Manjit Singh. The last one being high jumper Jithin C. Thomas from Kerala, who lost the title to Tamil Nadu’s Nikhil Chittarasu. Jithin could manage to clear only 2.13m today as against his 2.20m in last year.
Nikhil sailed over 2.19m this evening for the top spot.
Arokia Rajiv extended his winning-streak at NSNIS Patiala to three after his back-to-back victories over 400m distance in the Indian Grand Prix earlier this month and equalled his personal best 46.57s, which he first set while winning the National Open championships at Chennai last year. Kunhu Muhammed (46.83) and Bibin Mathew (46.94) collected the remaining medals in that race.
As expected the Pune-based Army Sports Institute’s Dileep Kumar, representing Maharashtra, won the decathlon event garnering 6546 points.
In the absence of any top notch athletes to push her, Mayookha Johny decided to reserve her energy for the triple jump and thus made it easy on the long jump with a modest leap of 6.16m to win the gold.