Yarraji blurs to gold in 12.89s
Ranchi, May 17
Jyothi Yarraji won the women’s 100m hurdles gold with ease and bettered her own meet record on the penultimate day of the Federation Cup Senior Athletics Championships here today.
Yarraji, representing Andhra Pradesh, had set a meet record (13.18 seconds) in the heats yesterday. She further improved the record to 12.89 seconds on her way to winning gold.
She also ran inside the qualification standard of 13.63 seconds set by the Athletics Federation of India for the Asian Championships to be held in Bangkok on July 12-16.
Tamil Nadu’s R Nithya Ramraj was a distant second with a time of 13.44 seconds, while Sapna Kumari of Jharkhand was third with 13.58 seconds.
As expected, the men’s 110m hurdles gold went to Maharashtra’s Tejas Ashok Shirse, who clocked 13.72 seconds.
Punjab’s Twinkle will be the one to watch out for in the final of the women’s 800m tomorrow. In her heat today, she clocked 2 minutes, 5.39 seconds to breach the Asian Championships qualifying mark of 2:05.74. On the men’s side, Ankesh Chaudhary of Himachal Pradesh clocked 1:49.73 in his heat, while Anu Kumar of Uttarakhand clocked 1:49.93.
Towards the end of the day, rain and thunderstorm hit the Birsa Munda Stadium causing a blackout.