India won three gold and two bronze medals on the second day of the Asian Athletics Championships
India won three gold and two bronze medals, including Jyoti Yaraji’s title in women’s 100m hurdles and Ajay Kumar Saroj in men’s 1500m, on the second day of the Asian Athletics Championships on Thursday. Commonwealth Games silver medalist Abdullah Abubakar won India’s third gold of the day in the men’s triple jump. The Indian athletes put up an impressive performance on Thursday, winning three gold medals out of the 10 gold medals at stake. Apart from this, Aishwarya Mishra (53.07 seconds) won the bronze medal in the women’s 400m race, while Tejaswin Shankar (7527 points) won the bronze medal in the men’s decathlon. It was also the first medal for both Aishwarya and Tejaswin at the senior international level in these events. He is participating in these events for the first time in any senior international competition.
Tejaswin had won a bronze medal in the high jump at the 2022 Commonwealth Games but switched to decathlon last year. Twenty-three-year-old Jyoti won India’s first gold medal in the competition. This is also his first gold medal at the senior international level. He left behind two Japanese runners Terada Asuka (13.13 s) and Aoki Masumi (13.26 s) in the final with a time of 13.09 s. Jyoti later said, “I was in very good shape and I had a feeling that today would be my day and I would be able to give my best. But suddenly it rained and I could not get my best time. “She said,” I was in the lead till the fifth hurdle but slipped a bit in the seventh hurdle. This was also a reason why my time could not be less than 13 seconds. Jyoti’s national record is 12.82 seconds.
In the men’s 1500 meters race, Saroj performed brilliantly and won the gold medal with a time of 3 minutes 41.51 seconds. This is his third consecutive medal in this competition. He had won gold in Bhubaneswar in 2017 and silver in Doha in 2019. Abubakar recorded his best performance of the season with a jump of 16.92m. He finished ahead of Japan’s Ikehata Hikaru (16.73m) and Korea’s Jangwoo Kim (16.59m). The 27-year-old started with a foul and did his best in the fourth attempt to clinch the gold medal. Abhishek Pal on Wednesday opened India’s medal tally by winning a bronze in the men’s 10,000m.
