With Olympic dream, budding athletes bask in gold glory

Mumbai, Jan 9 (IANS) Indias quest for gold in the Olympics got some more claimants with budding athletes from all over the country proving their mettle in the 2019-20 Reliance Foundation Youth Sports (RFYS) National Athletics Championships. A total of 33 new records were set across the 96 events contested over the past three days.Eleven records in 14 disciplines were broken on the final day itself at the Priyadarshini Park, Malabar Hill, here on Thursday.Athletes from North Zone came from behind to win an equal number of golds as their counterparts from the South on day three. Fourteen gold medals ensured both North and South ended the finals with 36 gold medals each.Sathi Patra (14:83 Sec) shattered the previous record in the Senior Girls 100M hurdles by a fine margin while Mumbai's Priya Sabhajeet Gupta (14:89 Sec) emulated the feat in the Junior Girls category in the same discipline. Sagar Singh (56.03m) from Punjab provided the other highlight of the day when he bettered the previous best in the Senior Boys Javelin Throw event.The third season of the RFYS Athletics kicked off in September, witnessing over 32,000 athletes from 5500 educational institutes across 8 categories. All records in the finals that have bettered the current national record will be vetted by the Athletics Federation of India (AFI). Selected athletes will be called up for a camp in the coming months to train under world class coaches in the Reliance Foundation Odisha High Performance Centre in Bhubaneswar.
--IANS kk/bg