Naveen sets national junior record in 600m

Tamil Nadu's R Naveen set a national junior record in 600m race en route to his second gold of the meet on the second day of the 25th National Inter-Zone Junior Athletics Championships here today.
Naveen, who had missed the national mark yesterday while taking 100m sprint title by just three hundredth of a second, today shattered Haryana boy Puneet Chauhan's 600m national record (1:24.54) as he led the field from start to finish in one minute 23.22 secs.
Teammate U Bharath (1:26.14) and Assam boy Santosh Bhagat (1:28.87) took silver and bronze respectively.
Tamil Nadu continued to lead the points table while Maharashtra and Kerala occupied the next two spots at the end of day two.

Two Maharashtra athletes -- Sumit Kumar Jaiswal (400m hurdles) and Amolak Singh (Octathlon) -- bettered meet records as in the youth boys' category.
Jaiswal, who represented India at World Youth Championships in Donetsk (Ukraine), clocked a personal best of 53.81 secs to win the 400m hurdles that improved state-mate Satish S Pasala's last year's performance by 0.05 secs.
Amolak Singh, who hails from Punjab but representing Maharashtra here, made a gallant effort to better his Army Sports Institute team-mate Dileep Kumar's national record in the eight-event Octathlon.
However, he was 45 points short as he aggregated 5763 points at the end. He had the satisfaction of erasing the previous meet mark held by Kerala's Arun S Kumar by a good margin of 305 points.