Bhubaneswar: Local boy Dondapati Mrutyam Jayaram opened the account for the host State Odisha by winning a gold medal in the U-20 Men's 100m race of the 39th National Junior Athletics Championship here at Kalinga Stadium, with a timing of 10.50 sec. The silver and bronze medal was claimed by Maharashtra sprinter Laukik Melge and Harsh Raut clocking 10.52 and 10.75 respectively.
Aarti of Haryana set an NMR with 47:21.68 in the U-29 Women 1000 race walk. The old record was in the name of Mansi Negi 47:30.94 in the year 2022. Vaishnavi Negi of Uttarakhand and Mahima Choudhury of Rajasthan won silver and bronze medals with a timing of 50:12.79 and 50:30.15 respectively.
All the medal winners of the U-18 men's 5000 race walk event crossed the previous national record. Nitin Gupta of Uttar Pradesh (20:01.64), Tushar Panwar of Uttarakhand (20:20.63) and Sachin of Haryana (20:21.93) won the gold, silver and bronze medals respectively. The previous national record was in the name of Suraj Panwar 20:23.30.
In the U-18 Women’s 100m race, Abinaya Rajaranjan of Tamil Nadu created NMR clocking 11.66 sec , the previous record was in the name of Rashmi Sheregar (11.89) in the year 2015.
Amritpal Singh of Punjab set a NR in the U-16 Boys Long Jump with 4.71m. The earlier record was in the name of Mohit Yadav 4.68m in the year 2024.
Pooja Singh comfortably won gold at 1.82m with a new meet record in the U-18 Women’s High Jump event, which was better than the previous meet record of 1.81m set by herself in the year 2023 at Coimbatore.
She made efforts to improve her national U20 high jump record of 1.83m set recently in Peru at the 2024 World Athletics U20 meet, but failed to cross the bar at 1.85m.
Pooja with 1.83m rewrote the national U20 women’s national record in the high jump to qualify for the final of the World Athletics U-20 Championship at Lima in the month of August this year.
