Asian Games: Two gold medals in a trice

The 21-year-old Swapna was competing in the final 800m leg of the event with a toothache and managed to keep her lead intact. She accumulated a total of 6026 points over two days to take the yellow metal. This was India’s 11th gold medal at the 2018 Asian Games. Barman logged 6026 points from the seven events competed for two days. She won the high jump (1003 points) and javelin throw (872 points) events and finished second-best in shot put (707 points) and long jump (865 points). Her weakest returns were in the 100m (981 points, 5th position) and 200m in which she finished seventh with 790 points.

Going into the 800m run, the last of the seven-event competition, Barman was leading China’s Qingling Wang by 64 points. She needed a good run in the concluding event, in which she eventually finished fourth. It was the same event after which she had collapsed during the Asian Athletics Championship last year in Bhubaneswar but despite finishing fourth on Wednesday, she emerged a champion.

Another Indian in the fray, Purnima Hembram was 18 points behind Japan’s Yuki Yamasaki, going into the 800m run, but she finished just ahead of Barman and overall fourth with 5837 points. Qingling (5954) won the silver and Yamasaki the bronze medal with 5873 points.

Before Barman, only Bengal’s Soma Biswas and Karnataka’s JJ Shobha and Pramila Aiyappa had returned with a medal from the Asian Games.

Biswas and Shobha had finished two-three at both Busan Asian Games (2002) and the Doha Games (2006), while Pramila had won a bronze at the Guangzhou edition. Arpinder pipped Uzbekistan's Ruslan Kurbanov, who took the silver medal with a personal best jump of 16.62 metres. The bronze medal went to Chinese Cao Shuo, who jumped 16.56 metres. 

Before the 25-year-old Arpinder, the previous champion was Mohinder Singh Gill in 1970 with an effort of 16.11m. Another Indian in the fray, AV Rakesh Babu was sixth with a best attempt of 16.40 metres. Arpinder had flopped in his first attempt. After the invalid jump, he came back stronger with a jump of 16.58 metres in the second attempt which made him the leader after the first two attempts. Babu, in his second attempt of 16.40, was second behind his compatriot, even as Ruslan till then had his best of 16.28. Arpinder gained further ascendancy when he came out with a jump of 16.77m. Ruslan too made his best attempt of 16.62 metres. The Uzbek athlete, however, could not topple Arpinder as the former made attempts of 15.99, 16.43, 16.41 in his final three chances respectively.

Arpinder jumped 16.08 in his fourth attempt before fouling the last two attempts. China's Cao delivered his best in his sixth and last attempt with a jump of 16.56 to push Japanese Kohei Yamashita to the fourth spot. Yamashita had fouled his last three attempts. His best of 16.46 came in his third attempt.