The big names in Indian swimming dazzled by setting new games records on the fifth day of the 36 th National Games swimming events at the Sardar Patel Aquatic Complex here on Thursday.
Olympian Srihari Nataraj broke the existing record in 100m backstroke event while Madhya Pradesh’s Advait Page and crowd favourite Maana Patel kept their date with the record. Nina Venkatesh barged into the record breakers group by setting a new mark in 50m butterfly. Kerala’s Sajan Prakash swam to his third gold medal of the meet while winning the 50m butterfly.
Advait Page came up with a terrific kick in the final 50 metres to upstage leaders Aryan Nehra and Sajan Prakash to win the gold in 800m freestyle. Local lad Aryan Nehra set the pace and led for the most part of the race with Sajan Prakash stalking the leader. Advait, who was far behind the leaders, caught up with them in the final 100 metres. At the homestretch, Advait went all out and finished ahead of Aryan and Sajan with a new record of 8:12.24s.
In the 100m backstroke, Srihari Nataraj led from the start but slowed down at the finish in order to conserve energy for his last event, the 50m butterfly. However, Srihari still managed to set a new record by clocking 55.80s and broke P.S. Madhu’s old mark (57.62s) set in 2015.
But Srihari looked out of sorts in the 50m butterfly which saw Sajan Prakash blitz the field to take the gold in 25.10s.
Maana Patel proved that she is the undisputed queen of backstroke as she effortlessly won the 100m event without any competition. Maana broke her own old mark (1:05.32) by clocking 1:04.35s. In the final.
In 50m butterfly, Karnataka’s Nina Venkatesh bested Divya Satija, who had set a new record (28.76s) in the heats, for the gold. Nina clocked 28.39s for the new mark while Divya (28.63s) and Tanishi Gupta (28.68s) also came inside the existing mark.
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