Vedaant Madhavan creates new meet record in 1500m freestyle

Maharashtra's Vedaant Madhavan rewrote the national record in 1500m freestyle event for group I boys at the ongoing Junior National Aquatic Championships here on Sunday. Leading the pack with good pace and an efficient stroke, Vedaant, son of actor R Madhavan, clocked 16:01.73 to erase his statemate Advait Page's 2017 record of 16:06.43 seconds. Vedaant beat Karnataka's Amogh Anand Venkatesh (16:21.98 seconds) and Bengal's Shubhojeet Gupta (16:34.06), who won the silver and bronze medals respectively. In the 400m freestyle for group II girls, Karnataka's Harshika Ramachandra created a new meet record with a time of 4:29.25 seconds, while statemate Rujula S finished 10s behind Harshika with a time of 4:39.53 seconds to settle for silver.

Harshika created another meet record in the 200m butterfly event. She eclipsed Apeksha Fernandes' three-year-old mark of 2:23.67 to win the gold. Harshika clocked 2:23.20 seconds to finish ahead of Karnataka's Tanishi Gupta who clocked 2:28.54 seconds and Telangana's Mokshitha Addanki. Another record was set in the 50m breaststroke event for girls group I as Maharashtra's Apeksha Fernandes continued to shine, winning her second gold medal of the meet.

She clocked an impressive 33.49 seconds to win gold ahead of her statemate Zaara Jabbar who clocked 35.91 seconds. At the end of day two, Karnataka led the medal tally with a total of 31 medals, followed by Maharashtra at 17 and Telangana at 8.