Commonwealth and Asian Games champion shooter Jitu Rai opened his campaign with two medals while records continued to tumble by a heap in the swimming competition but the mood turned somber at the 35th National Games after a young netball player lost his life in a freak accident on the second day of the event here today.
On yet another exciting day of competitions, there was gloom as well after Maharashtra's 21-year-old netball player Mayuresh Pawar died in an apparent case of drowning at a nearby beach here while on his way back with the team from a practice session.
After initial reports of a cardiac arrest, the postmortem of the deceased player made it clear that he died due to drowning after falling into the waters at the Shankhumugham beach. The tragedy left the Maharashtra team shattered and it was not yet clear whether the team would continue to participate in netball.
On the competition front, Services Sports Control Board sprung to the top with 12 medals (8 gold, 1 silver and 3 bronze), followed by Haryana (7 gold, 2 silver and 1 bronze) and Madhya Pradesh (5 gold, 1 silver and 6 bronze).
Despite the tragedy, the show went on in other events across the state with the swimming pool offering the most exciting action for the second day running. First up was the 1500m men's event in which local favourite Sajan Prakash brought the house down by bagging the gold medal with a new meet record of 15:55.78s. The silver was picked by Sourabh Sangvekar with a timing of 16:07.12s, followed by West Bengal's Sanu Debnath who clocked 16:27.91s.
Another record sank in the 800m women's event when Maharashtra's Akankhsha Vohra clocked 9:15.30s to break the meet record by a second. Karnataka's Malvika V (9:23.95s) bagged the silver, while Maharshtra's Monique Gandhi (9:29.93s) came third.
One more record tumbled when Sandeep Sejwal, representing Madhya Pradesh, breached his own mark to clinch the 200m men's breastroke gold with a timing of 2:13.53s. He was followed by the Kerala duo of Anoop Augustine (2:18.11s) and Arun S (2:19.73s).
