KIYG 2025: Jithin Arjunan leads pack of five boys in rewriting meet records

Patna, May 12 (IANS) Jithin Arjunan of Tamil Nadu led a group of determined boys who broke five Games Records on the opening day of athletics competitions in the Khelo India Youth Games (KIYG) 2025 Bihar at the Patliputra Sports Complex here on Monday.

Bihar’s Alka Singh won an emotional gold for the home state in the girls' Shot Put with her second attempt measuring 14.73m to share some of the gloss with the record-breaking boys.

Jithin Arjunan broke the existing boys' Long Jump mark three times and added a silver in the 110m Hurdles to be the standout performer of the day, just ahead of Rajasthan discus thrower Hansraj Dhayal. With a heave of the discus over 63.18m, Hansraj Dhayal surprised team-mate Vishal Kumar and Haryana’s Nischay, who won a bronze medal in the Asian Youth Championships last month.

Dhayal’s second throw over 58.39m was enough to get him gold, but he breached the 60m mark twice, nailing the Games record at 61.77m on his fourth try and 63.18m on the fifth. Vishal Kumar and Nischay tried hard to challenge the leader but were unable to find the distance.

Jithin Arjunan, who won the National Youth Championships in Bilaspur in June 2024, spreadeagled the field with his opening jump of 7.60m. The lad from Dindigul district sailed past the meet mark pegged at 7.42m by Aryan Choudhary in 2022. Jithin then earned himself a place in the 110m Hurdles final before he returned to the Long Jump pit to leap farther.

Saif Farooq Chafekar’s conquest of the boys' 110m hurdles was accompanied by a new meet record of 13.48 seconds. The Navi Mumbai lad had trained his sights on the Khelo India Youth Games gold, and his focused preparation paid off as he showed his friend and competitor Jithin Arjunan a clean pair of heels.

That win came soon after Shourya Ambura won the first gold medal in track events in this competition. An Asian Youth Championships bronze medalist with a sub-14-second time, Shourya Ambure made a memorable return to the track, where her amazing season began with a victory in 14.55 seconds in the National Youth Championships.

The Thane girl brooked no challenge as she won an expected gold for Maharashtra on Monday in a time of 14.11 seconds. The gap between her and her nearest rival kept increasing as the race progressed, and Shourya Ambure finished more than five meters ahead of West Bengal’s Sonali Das, who needed the photo-finish judges to declare her the medallist.

Late in the evening, Maharashtra’s Rohit Shivaji Binnar (boys 3000m) joined the list of record-breakers on Monday. It was quite apt that there was a meet mark in the distance event to bring the action to a close on an evening that had started with Kadir Khan (Uttar Pradesh) accounting for the first new meet record on the track, clocking 47.67 seconds in the first heats of the 400m.

A bronze medalist in the National Youth Championships here in March, Kabir Khan improved on the mark set at 48.34 by CR Abdul Razak in 2019. Sayed Sabeer dipped in under 48 seconds in the tougher heat that followed, to raise visions of a keen final.

--IANS

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