Harmilan breaks 19-year-old record to win 1500m title
LUCKNOW: The saying that daughters are the mirror reflection of their mothers aptly describes Lucknow’s Madhuri Saxena and her daughter Harmilan Kaur Bains.
In 2003, the middle distance runner then Saxena (now Mrs Bains) had a silver medal at the 15th Asian Athletic Championships in Manila, and on Thursday Harmilan stole the thunder from the sprinters by breaking Sunita Rani’s long-standing national record at the 60th National Open Athletics Championships at Hanamkonda Warangal.
Representing Punjab, Harmilan, cruised home in 4:05.39s, to erase the mark set by Sunita Rani at 4:06.03s, in the Asian Games in Busan in 2002. She also shattered OP Jaisha’s meet record of 4:11.83s, set in Delhi in 2006. Delhi’s Chanda gamely shadowed 23-year-old Harmilan until the Punjab runner sped away at the bell to win by a sizable margin.
Harmilan, the start-to-finish specialist, undefeated in eight national-level 1500m races since January 2020, has shown rapid progress, improving from 4:14.68s, in the Khelo India University Games 2020 in Bhubaneshwar last year to 4:08.70s, and 4:08.27s in the Federation Cup (March 16, 2021) and Indian Grand Prix 4 (June 21, 2021) respectively, in Patiala. On Thursday, she capped it with a national mark.
It needed such a strong effort to push a couple of good sprint events to the shade. Naresh Kumar (Andhra Pradesh) and
Delhi’s Tarandeep Kaur took the honours as the fastest male and female athlete of the meet by winning the 100m dash.
The Day Two of the nationals also saw Uttar Pradesh’s Kiran Baliyan win women’s shot put gold with a throw of 6.99 metre. She was followed by Punjab’s Manpreet Kaur and Railway’s M Kaur.
Taranjeet also hogged the limelight winning the 100m with a personal best time of 11.50, two years after she was knocked down by a car and broke a collar bone.
Taranjeet knocked twotenths of a second from her previous best of 11.70 clocked in winning the Federation Cup Junior (U20) title in Bhopal on January 25 this year.
Naresh Kumar won the men’s
sprint in 10.30 seconds, the second fastest time by an Indian in 100m this year behind Gurindervir Singh’s 10.27 seconds in Patiala on June 26.
It also gave the 23-year-old from Guntur a place among the five fastest sprinters in Indian history, handing him the Meet Record, bettering Anil Kumar’s 10.37 seconds set in 2001.
The race produced personal bests for Assam’s Amlan Borgohain and Harjit Singh (Services) with times of 10.34 seconds for both, a photo finish separating them by six-thousandths of a second to secure the silver medal for the former.
To their credit, the trio was able to script great runs despite a couple of false starts by Services’ KS Pranav and Satnam Singh.