BHUBANESWAR: Coach Hanuman Singh’s six students from Bangaon village, Fatehabad districts of Haryana made a clean sweep in the javelin events of the 39th National Junior Athletics Championship, which concluded here at Kalinga Stadium on Wednesday.
His students participated in different age group javelin events and bagged four gold and two silver medals, also rewrote two national records and created one new meet record.
“It’s one of the toughest times for one of my throwers Poonam. When we were all preparing for the championship, she lost her father on the 1st of December this month, with a heavy heart she took part and won a silver medal with a personal best throw”, said coach Hanuman Singh.
Poonam has won a silver medal each in Junior National at Bhubaneswar in U-18, Federation Cup at Lucknow in U-20, and also in Junior South Asian Athletics Championships.
“The grassroots program started in the year 2012," Hanuman said talking about the infrastructure of his academy. "The girls have created records in U14, U18, U20 and even U23 competitions, but have yet to give any name to the academy. We do not have any synthetic ground for practice in Bangaon village. Three to four times a month particularly on Sunday we travelled 60km to practices in a nearby synthetic track”.
In the U-20 Women’s javelin, Deepika won the gold medal with 52.45m and created a new meet record. The previous record was in the name of Puspa Jakhar (49.05m) in the year 2016. Bhavya Pilania and Poonam grabbed the U-18 girls' javelin gold and silver medals with 52.70 and 50.73 m respectively. In the U-16 girls' javelin event, Muskan and Nisha won gold and silver medals with a distance of 46.87 and 44.24m respectively. Both the Bangaon village girls crossed the previous NR of 40.01m set by Shivani Patel in 2024.
Similarly, in the U-14 girls javelin event, Minakshi scrapped the old national record with a 41.84 m throw. The earlier NR was in the name of Dhriti Anand (36.50m) in the year 2024.