Asian Athletics: Women keep tricolour flying

Amman, July 27: Women kept the tricolour flying with Sinimole Paulose winning a silver in 800m while JJ Shobha and Sushmita Singha Roy clinching a silver and bronze respectively in heptathlon on the second day of the ongoing Asian Athletics Championship here.

It took the India medal tally to four,three silver and one bronze. On Day One, national record holder Preeja Sreedharan had won a silver in women's 10,000m race.

Paulose clocked 2:06.15s behind Truong Thanh Hang of Vietnam (2:04.77s) while another Indian Sushma Devi was fourth with a time of 2:10.63s. Ayako Jinnouchi (2:08.75s) of Japan bagged the bronze.

Paulose's effort was though well below her personal best of 2:02.02s and her season's best mark of 2:04.65s during the National Combined Events and Jumps in Pune last month.

In women's heptathlon, Shobha scored 5356 aggregate points while Sushmita totalled 5154 points. The gold in the seven-event discipline was won by Irina Naumenko of Kazakhstan with 5617 points.

Meanwhile, Soma K Chitra and Manjeet Kaur qualified for the women's 400m final. Chitra won heat number two with a time of 53.60s while Manjeet clocked 55.70s to finish second in heat number one.

Joseph Abraham and Kuldev Singh also qualified for men's 400m hurdles final after finishing second and fourth in their respective heats.

Joseph clocked 50.91s to finish second in heat number two while Kuldev ran 51.92s to finish fourth in heat number one. First four finishers of each heat move into the final.

In men's 10000m final, Surendra Singh and Santosh Kumar finished fifth and sixth, clocking 31:05.68s and 31:16.43s respectively. The gold was won by Ahmad Hassan Abdullah of Qatar with a time of 29:45.95s.

Three events were held in the women's heptathlon and Shobha won long jump and javelin throw with efforts of 5.97m and 40.47m respectively. She was, however, fourth in 800m with a time 02:32.6s.

Sushmita was third in 800m (02:27.9s) and long jump (5.81m) while she finished fourth in javelin throw, clearing a distance of 32.16m.

Four events in the discipline were held yesterday.

The talking point of the second day of the Championship though was the record breaking effort of Francis Samuel of Qatar in 100m sprint. Samuel became the fastest man in Asia and the first Asian athlete to break the 10.00 sec barrier.

The Qatari clocked 9.99s to erase Japanese Koji Ito's Asian Record of 10.00s set in 1998.

In the women's 100m, favorite Susantika Jayasinghe of Sri Lanka won the title of the 'Fastest Women Athlete' of the Championship with a personal best timing of 11.19s though with more than legal wind speed of 3.1metre per second.

UNI