Maana Patel, Srihari Nataraj headline 200m backstroke

Maana Patel, an 18-year-old from Ahmedabad, won the women's 200m backstroke event in a time of two minutes and twenty-three seconds.

Maana Patel after winning the women's 200m backstroke in the Khelo India Youth Games in Pune on Sunday.

Maana Patel lent a touch of class to the swimming competition in the Khelo India Youth Games by winning the women’s 200m backstroke with a time of 2 minutes 23.00 seconds, at the Balewadi Complex on Sunday.

However, the 18-year-old from Ahmedabad could not stop Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu from overtaking Gujarat in the 4x100m medley relay.

With a struggle for fixing the photo finish pad on the pool affecting the smooth conduct of the races, Maana asked the technical officials to lower the touch pad that was above the water level.

Read: Prodigies Devanshi Rana, Abhinav Shaw shoot gold

There was a prompt response in acceding to the request, but it was a jarring note, race after race, when the touch pad had to be lowered into the pool and brought out, possibly leading to a manual stopping of the clock in many cases.

Srihari Nataraj tackled the issue without any fuss by crouching high for the diving start, and collected one more gold medal in winning the men’s 200-metre backstroke, ahead of Karnataka team mate Siva Sridhar.

Karnataka, however, was lying third in the medals tally behind host Maharashtra and Delhi, with 12 gold, 12 silver and seven bronze.

Maharashtra was marginally ahead of Delhi with 14 gold, nine silver and six bronze. Delhi also had 14 gold, but eight silver and 11 bronze.

Tamil Nadu followed with six gold, seven silver and three bronze.

Kushagra Rawat, Anurag Singh and Swadesh Mondal accounted for Delhi’s gold collection this day, in freestyle and medley events.

Maharashtra was well served by Vedant Bapna, Yuga Birnale, Kenisha Gupta and its women’s medley relay team, in enhancing the gold collection.

Suvana Baskar and the women’s medley relay team won the gold for Karnataka, apart from Srihari Nataraj.

The resultsMenUnder-21800m freestyle: 1. Kushagra Rawat (Del) 8:14.31; 2. Sushrut Kapse (Mah) 8:36.89; 3. Vishal Grewal (Del) 8:59.91. 200m backstroke: 1. Srihari Nataraj (Kar) 2:05.26; 2. Siva Sridhar (Kar) 2:07.53; 3. Anurag Sagar (Del) 2:12.20. 200m medley: 1. Shivaksh Sahu (Cgh) 2:14.43; 2. P. Chandru (Kar) 2:14.53; 3. PJ Jagannathan (Ker) 2:14.68 Under-17800m freestyle: 1. Anurag Singh (Del) 8:48.00; 2. Sanjay Jayakrishnan (Kar) 8:51.92; 3. Kapil Shetty (Mah) 8:53.63 200m backstroke: 1. Vedant Bapna (Mah) 2:10.46; 2. Nanak Moolchandani (Del) 2:11.80; 3. Jaswanth Reddy (Tel) 2:16.10 200m medley: 1. Swadesh Mondal (Del) 2:13.48; 2. Shoan Ganguly (Goa) 2:17.07; 3. D. Adhithya (TN) 2:17.28 Women Under-21 200m backstroke: 1. Maana Patel (Guj) 2:23.00; 2. Soubrity Mondal (WB) 2:29.80; 3. Yuga Birnale (Mah) 2:34.09 200m medley: 1. Yuga Birnale (Mah) 2:32.75; 2. Firdoush Kayamkhan (Raj) 2:35.94; 3. Kalyani Saxena (Guj) 2:35.95 4 x 100m medley relay: 1. Maharashtra 4:41.17; 2. Tamil Nadu 4:49.33; 3. Gujarat 4:49.86 Under-17 200m backstroke: 1. Suvana Baskar (Kar) 2:26.05; 2. Nina Venkatesh (Kar) 2:31.00; 3. Shrungi Bandekar (Goa) 2:32.84 200m medley: 1. Kenisha Gupta (Mah) 2:29.68; 2. Shrungi Bandekar (Goa) 2:32.28; 3. Kanya Nayyar (MP) 2:33.19 4x100m medley relay: 1. Karnataka 4:36.91; 2. Maharashtra 4:43.06; 3. Delhi 4:45.55