Seema, Gurindervir set youth national records

Two national youth records fell by the wayside on the opening day of the 14th National Youth Athletics Championships which began here today.
Himachal Pradesh runner Seema erased Kerala's Anumol Thampi's meet and national mark of 10:00.22 in girls' 3000m race with a noteworthy effort of 9 minutes 56.25 seconds.
Maharashtra's Poonam Sonune (10:02.14) and Uttar Pradesh girl Amrita Patel (10:04.85) clinched the other two medals at the G M C Balayogi Stadium at Gachibowli here.
Delhi lad Raj Shekhar, who won the boys' 3000m race with a timing of 8:42.93, missed the World Youth qualifying mark (8:42.00) narrowly.
In the evening, Punjab sprinter Gurindervir Singh provided a stunner by smashing the national record in boys' 100m final, clocking 10.74 secs. His time improved Praveen Muthukumaran's six year old mark by just 1/100th of a second. Delhi's Ch Palender Kumar pushed him hard and finished second with another noteworthy 10.80s.

As expected, Bengal's Rajashree Prasad won the girls' 100m in 12.33 secs. Earlier this year, Rajshree had clocked 12.17 secs to win the National School Games title in Pune.

Haryana throwers ruled the day with best performances, starting with discus thrower Abhay Gupta in the morning.
Gupta hurled the disc to a stupendous 58.80m that was way ahead of teammate and favourite Sahil Silwal's effort of 53.74m.
In shot put, Mohit heaved the iron ball to 19.01m for the top spot in the absence of national youth record-holder Dipender Dabas (20.63m) who is also the event leader in Asian youth rankings last season.

Tamil Nadu javelin thrower N Hemamalini unleashed the spear to 44.03m to retain the gold. In long jump, Tamil Nadu's R Punitha took the top spot with a modest effort of 5.75m.