Four Indian athletes qualified for the Rio Olympics on Sunday, taking the strength of the country’s contingent at the Olympic Games to three-digit figures for the first time.
Archer Atanu Das qualified in the men’s recurve individual category. The men’s team, on the other hand, had failed to make the cut for the August 5-21 Games.
Orissa’s Srabani Nanda clocked 23.03 seconds to qualify for the women’s 200 metres event, bettering the qualification mark of 23.2 seconds by 0.17 seconds.
Long jumper Ankit Sharma sealed his Rio berth with an 8.17-metre effort at a qualifier in Kazakhstan, with the criteria set at 8.15 metres.
Earlier on Sunday, quarter-miler Muhammed Anas qualified by shattering the men’s 400m national record on the second day of the Polish Athletics Championship at Bydgoszcz. 21-year-old Anas clocked 45.40 seconds, the exact Rio qualification timing, to book his Olympics berth, becoming the 21st Indian track and field athlete to qualify for the upcoming Games and the 100th overall.
The Kerala athlete shattered his own national record of 45.44 seconds which he set on Friday on the first day of the same competition in Poland.
Rajiv Arokia, whose national record of 45.47 seconds Anas broke on Friday, finished second with a timing of 45.60 seconds.
On Saturday, sprinter Dutee Chand qualified for the women’s 100m, less than a year after she was cleared to race following the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s (CAS) ruling on gender testing guidelines.
Earlier in the week, Asian Games champion Vikas Krishan (75kg) and Commonwealth Games gold-medallist Manoj Kumar (64kg), too, booked Olympic berths after advancing to the semifinals of the International Boxing Association’s (AIBA) World Qualifying Tournament in Baku, Azerbaijan.
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