Virdhawal Khade
Guangzhou: Indian swimmer Virdhawal Khade’s hopes of improving on his bronze medal pursuit in the Asian Games, suffered an unexpected jolt as he failed to make it to the 100m freestyle finals here on Wednesday.
In a slow race in which he had none to push him to a better time, the 19 year old Khade clocked 51.25 seconds that won him the 3rd heat in the morning ahead of compatriot Aaron D’Souza 52.71 seconds. But that placed him 13th in the overall list. D’Souza ended 23rd in a field of 40.
For someone like Khade who has had freestyle as his strong point in his young and small career so far, and had missed the 50m freestyle bronze by 0.03 seconds, he was quite confident that he would land with a medal.
However, he had to face the bitter truth when he completed the race and turned to look at the giant display screen to see the timings, his immediate reaction being that he put his hand on head as he realised that he had not done enough to qualify for the final.
After a reaction time of 0.76 seconds, Khade had clocked 24.57 seconds for the first 50. However, after the turn the others slackened and so did Virdhawal with a time of 25.78 seconds. Rehan Poncha clocked 2:8.55s in finishing 15th in the men’s 200m individual medley.
On the other hand, India had a reason to celebrate as well. One of the bright upcoming stars of Indian sports, Vijender Singh defeated the Chinaman Yu Ting Yang 9-2 to step ahead into the quarters of the 75 kg section in boxing at the Foshan Gymnasium.
After a slow start and being a point down at 1-2 in the second round, Vijender unleashed punches in a hurry to overwhelm his opponent. Starting with the bronze medal victory in the last edition of Asian Games in Doha in 2006, Vijender has grown in stature, winning the Olympics Bronze and world championships bronze medals in the last 2 years.
The current world No.1, Vijender will meet Deckjin Cho of Korea in the quarterfinals on 20th of November. The Korean had defeated the Turkmenistan A. Bashirov with a huge margin of 10-4 in the pre-quarters.
The other Indian Vikas Krishan started strongly and made it a one-sided affair and cruised to an 8-1 points victory over Saylom Ardee of Thailand, to reach the pre-quarterfinals. Krishan will meet Amangeldi Hudaybergenov of Turkmenistan in the next round on the 19th of November.
Tags: Asian Games, Asian Games 2010, Boxing, India, Indian Sports, Indian Swimmer, Sports, Sports India, Swimmer, Swimming, Vijender Singh, Virdhawal Khade
