Services mount medal charge

Ahmedabad, Oct 2: Defending champions Services Sports Control Board mounted a concerted medal charge on Sunday, with their rowers in Ahmedabad, wrestler Deepanshu in Gandhinagar, and springboard diver Siddharth Pardeshi in Rajkot picking up several gold medals in the 36th National Games on Sunday.
Jasveer Singh and Iqbal Singh claimed the Men’s Pair title in 6:34.06, finishing nearly 8 seconds ahead of the Maharashtra pair of Omkar Mhaske and Vipul Ghurde.
The Fours team of Jaswinder Singh, Bheem Singh, Punit Kumar and Ashish were also handsome winners, beating Punjab by 5 seconds.
Odisha’s Sonali Swain and Ritu Kaudi powered their way to gold with a classy display in the Women’s Pair final. The rowers, who train at the SAI Centre in Jagatpur, beat the Kerala pair of A Archa and Aleena Anto by six seconds.
At the Sardar Patel Aquatics Complex in Rajkot, diver Siddharth Pardeshi wrote himself into the record books as the winner of the first gold medal in the National Games Aquatics competitions. he beat his teammate and National Champion H London Singh to win the crown.
Astha Choudhury (Assam) became the first swimmer to rewrite a Games Record in topping the women’s 100m Butterfly heats even as Sajan Prakash (Kerala) and Sambhavv Rao (Karnataka) caught the eye by making it to two individual finals and the 4x100m Freestyle Relay.
Jasvir Kaur (Punjab) won the women’s 64kg class weightlifting gold with total lifts of 200kg, edging out Andhra Pradesh’s S Pallavi with a better effort in the clean & jerk competition.
Late on Saturday, Haryana’s grapplers won four of the six wrestling gold medals to keep their State on top of the medal table. (IANS)