Tajinderpal Singh Toor and Annu Rani secure gold medals at the Federation Cup Senior Athletics Championships

Tajinderpal Singh Toor and Annu Rani stole the show on the second day of the Federation Cup and won gold medals in their respective categories.

Reigning Asian Games champion in shot put Tajinderpal Singh Toor as well as Commonwealth Games bronze medallist javelin thrower Annu Rani clinched gold medals in their respective events and stole the headlines on the second day of the Federation Cup Senior Athletics Championships in Ranchi.

Although Annu produced an underwhelming performance compared to her standards as she could only manage a distance of 59.24m on her, it was still enough to secure the qualification mark for the upcoming Asian Championship as well as the Asian Games according to the benchmarks set by the Athletics Federation of India.

30-year-old Annu, who hails from Uttar Pradesh, has a personal best record of 63.82m which is also the national record in women’s javelin throw. She had set the NR last year and is determined to keep improving.

The women’s javelin throw qualifying standard for the July 12-16 Asian Championship is 54.73m, while the corresponding mark for the September 23-October 8 Hangzhou Asian Games is 56.46m.

Tajinderpal Singh Toor is also an Asian record holder and he is the reigning Asian Games champion. He managed to throw the ball to a distance of 20.42m to win the gold medal in men’s shot put. Toor’s throw was also below his personal best of 21.49m.

The qualifying mark in the Asian Championship as well as the Asian Games is 19m and Toor, representing Punjab, comfortably achieved that threshold. In fact, second and third-place finishers Delhi’s Sahib Singh (19.23m) and Punjab’s Karanveer Singh (19.05m) also breached the qualifying mark.

Odisha’s Srabani Nanda was the fastest female athlete as she won the 100m race and clocked 11.57 seconds at the Birsa Munda Stadium. However, her time fell short of the Asian Championship qualification standard of 11.44 seconds.

It was a similar case with the men’s 100m race as the fastest male athlete Amiya Kumar Mallick, also from Odisha, won the event with a time of 10.31 seconds but he also failed to achieve the qualifying standard of 10.19 seconds for both the Asian Championships and Asian Games.