Punjab's Harmilan Kaur Bains stole the thunder from the sprinters by breaking Sunita Rani's long-standing national record in the 1500 metres on the second day of the 60th National Open Athletics Championships in the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Hanamkonda on Thursday.
The 23-year-old start-to-finish specialist cruised home in 4:05.39 to erase the mark set by Sunita Rani at 4:06.03 in the Asian Games in Busan in 2002. She also shattered OP Jais'a's meet record of 4:11.83 set in Delhi in 2006. Del'i's KM Chanda gamely shadowed Harmilan until the Punjab runner sped away at the bell to win by a sizable margin. Harmilan, undefeated in eight national-level 1500m races since January 2020, has shown rapid progress, improving from 4:14.68 in the Khelo India University Games in Bhubaneswar last year to 4:08.70 and 4:08.27 in the Federation Cup (March 16) and Indian Grand Prix 4 (June 21) respectively in Patiala. On Thursday, she capped it with a National mark, the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) said in a release on Thursday.
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 Naresh Kumar's 10.30 seconds win came with 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. Quite inevitably, it gave him the meet record, improving on 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.