India win their first medal at Asian Junior Athletics as Navjeet Kaur Dhillon wins bronze

Navjeet Kaur Dhillon

Navjeet Kaur Dhillon won the first medal for India at the 16th Asian Junior Athletics meet in Taipei City, Chinese Taipei, on Thursday.

The 41-member Indian contingent arrived hours before the start of the games, thanks to a goof up by the Athletics Federation of India (AFI).

The AFI had applied for Chinese visas on June 6 through VFS Global, an agency which operates in 111 countries, but not Chinese Taipei.

“The applications submitted to us were on Chinese visa application forms, and were submitted at the Chinese Visa Application Service Centre,” the agency explained when contacted at its Indian headquarters in Mumbai. The Chinese Embassy returned the forms on June 9.

Navneet was competing on an empty stomach after a prolonged flight.

Despite that, she took the shot put bronze after a bad start. She did not get enough time to practice on the field, which resulted in her first two throws going out of the sector. She did manage to post 13.34m in her third round. She fouled in the fourth round, but came back stronger posting 13.56m on her fifth attempt.

Her final throw sealed the deal as she registered an impressive 14.99m, just 6 cm shy of a silver medal finish.

China’s Xu Jiaqi (16.50m) and Wang Ning-Yue (15.05) took the gold and silver medals in this event respectively.

This delay also affected sprinter Dutee Chand as well as decathletes Ankit Saini and Amolak Singh who were India’s top medal contenders.

Dutee missed the 100m heats while Saini and Singh did not start in their event. Dutee will now have to wait for the 200m race.

Sanjivini Jadhav was fifth in the women’s 5000m with a time of 17 minutes 00.75 seconds, while Maki Izumida of Japan won with a time of 16:18.35.

Prakash Singh (60.34m) and Kapil Mann (59.20m) were sixth and seventh respectively in the men’s hammer throw that was won by Ashraf Amgad Elseify of Qatar with 79.71m.

Anuj Singh cleared 4.50m in the men’s pole vault to place 11th among 12 athletes, while Bo-Kai Huang of China won the gold with 5.25m.

This is not the first time that the AFI is messing it up when it comes to international events. Some athletes had to return from the last Asian Youth Championships in Nanjing, China due to incorrect age mentioned by the AFI. Incidentally, Dutee Chand was one of them.