Three national and one meet marks have been improved on the fourth and penultimate day of the 29th National Junior Athletics Championships at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium here today.
The first national mark of the day came in youth girls' triple jump as Athira Surendran of Kerala erased G Gayathri's five-year old meet and national mark from the record books on her very first round jump of 12.86m.
Having pocketed the gold comfortably, the 12th standard student of Government Brennan Higher Secondary School from Thallassery eased off with 12.55m on the second and 12.44m on her fifth round respectively while fouled in all other attempts.
Although she was happy with the record, the SAI Thalassery trainee missed the Junior Worlds qualification by 4 cm.
Another athlete who missed the Eugene standard was Punjab long jumper Bikramjit Singh who produced a last round 7.54m to win the top spot in the youth boys section from Kerala's P V Suhail (7.50m) and Tamil Nadu's SAF junior champion P Anburaja (7.47m). Singh missed the qualifying mark by just 1 cm.
The second national mark of the day also came from a youth athlete as Amolak Singh of Maharashtra tabulated 5817 points in Octathlon to improve his state-mate Dileep Kumar's three-year old mark (5808 pts).
It was the second successive national title for Amolak after the Inter-Zone championships which he won at Kochi earlier this year.
The quartets from Tamil Nadu made a clean sweep in all the four medley relay events held in the evening. In that process they also improved the national record in boys' under-16 category as the foursome of L Ravi Kumar, M S Arun, T Santhoshkumar and R Balakrishnan clocked an impressive time of 1:58.02.
Earlier in the morning Haryana lad Nirbhay Singh extended his winning streak with a new meet mark of 59.62m in the last round of discus throw for Youth Boys.
Dinesh Kumar from his own state held the previous record of 59.02m since 2005. Nirbhay, the nephew of former national record-holder Shakti Singh, is eagerly looking for a slot in the next year's Youth Olympic Games as well as Asian junior championships.
