Chennai: When Dutee Chand clocked 11.62 secs in last year’s World Youth Championships at Donetsk, everyone started looking at the Odisha girl with eagerness. In Ukraine, she could not go beyond semi-finals. However she made a promise to come back to the global stage in this year’s World junior championships at Eugene that she realized with an awesome performance in the ongoing 12th Junior Federation Cup athletics championships on Friday evening.
Dutee clocked a remarkable 11.63 secs in the evening’s junior women 100m final that erased the listed national junior record of 11.75s held by Saraswati Dey since 1996 in a huge margin. A bronze medalist in the senior Asian championships at Pune last year in 200m, the fast raising sprinter has shown full of potential to make waves in the forthcoming Asian junior championships at Chinese Taipei next month.
Tamil Nadu’s Archana Suseendran, the double gold medalist in last year’s South Asian junior championships at Ranchi, finished a distant second in 12.14s while Bengal girl Himashree Roy take away the bronze clocking 12.20s.
Shot putter Navtejdeep also made world junior grade
Punjab’s Navtejdeep Singh, who won the gold medal in Commonwealth Youth Games at Douglas three years ago, proved his mettle yet again as he tossed the 6 kg iron ball to 18.56m and thus become the second athlete from this meet to qualify for the World junior championships. The second placed Shakti Solanki, another SAF junior gold medalist and world youth championship participant like Navtejdeep, have managed only 17.93m to gain a berth for the Asian junior meet as the qualification norm for the World juniors stood at 18.25m. Another Punjabi in the fray, Malkeet Singh, finished third with a heave of 17.38m.
Haryana metric miler Pinki outclassed the fancied Kerala runner P.U. Chitra to win the women’s 1500m event in 4 minutes 27.26 secs. Her winning time was well within the liberal world junior standard of 4:28.00, but was half-a-second slower than the superior Asian junior bronze medal grade!
A tired Chitra made a gallant effort to catch-up with Pinki but could manage only a second place in 4:30.19 whereas Delhi’s Preeti Lamba completes the podium with a time of 4:35.70.
However international Mohammed Afsal brought Kerala a thrilling win in the men’s race. Afsal won the closely fought race in 3:52.44 while Assam’s Ajay Kumar Saroj (3:52.60) and Bengal boy Shashi Bhushan (3:52.65) filled the next two spots.
Punjab state received the second gold of the day through long jumper Bhumika Thakur (5.94m). National junior champion Bhairabi Roy (West Bengal) could manage only the silver position as she managed to edge Tamil Nadu star G. Karthika by just 1 cm (5.75 to 5.74m).
Punjab javelin thrower Sarabjeet Singh, a student of DAV College in Chandigarh, hurled the spear to 71.07m to push Birendra Kumar from Gujarat (70.79m) to second spot. Sarabjeet’s college-mate Parvinder Kumar, representing Haryana, finished third with a throw of 69.06m. In that process all the medalists surpassed the qualifying mark for both World and Asian junior championships.
National junior champion Kumari Sharmila won the event for girls with a throw measuring 47.07m as aslo qualified for the Asian juniors in Taipei. Kerala’s C.K. Prajitha (41.86m) and Odisha’s Damayanthi Murmu (36.15m) won silver and bronze medals respectively.
Kerala high jumper Sreenith Mohan failed in his bid to qualify for the international competition as he could clear only 2.11m today.
Defending champions Haryana led the points table with 39 points at the end of first day’s competitions. Kerala and Punjab, with 36 points each, are in second place at the moment.