Hanumakonda: With 13 gold medals, Railways rules NOAC-2021

Hanumakonda: Railways which continued its dominance from day one emerged as the overall champion in the 60th National Open Athletics Championship (NOAC)-2021 held at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Hanumakonda. With 13 gold medals and 253.5 points, Railways was way ahead of its nearest rival Services on the medals and points tally at the end of the championship on Sunday. Harmilan Bains of Punjab who bagged gold medal in the 1,500m and Praveen Chithravel of Tamil Nadu who hopped to win the gold medal in the triple jump have been declared as the best athletes of the championship.

While the Railways led the overall medal tally with 13 gold, 10 silver and 13 bronze, the championship host Telangana ended up with just one bronze medal. The other Telugu-speaking State Andhra Pradesh managed to win a gold and a bronze medal. Odisha, Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh didn't open their account in the medals tally.

The final day of the tournament saw Rajasthan's Manju Bala break the meet record in Hammer Throw to clear a distance of 64.42m. Andhra Pradesh added another medal to its tally after Nalubothu Shanmuga Srinivas finished the men's 200m in third place. In the 10,000m run, Karthik Kumar of Services finished in 29:42.63 and Sanjivani Jadhav of Maharashtra won the women's 10,000m run in 34:20.03.