Haryana race walker Paramdeep Mor stripped of National Junior Athletics Championships silver medal for age fraud

Guwahati: Haryana race walker Paramdeep Mor was on Sunday stripped off his silver medal after he was found to be overage in the National Junior Athletics Championships. Mor won a silver medal in the 10km race walk event in the boys’ under-20 category with a time of 41:19.87 but was later found to be overage in the medical test. “Paramdeep Mor was found over-aged during medical/bone test and so his silver medal was taken back. AFI has zero-tolerance of age fraud, so he was disqualified,” Nitin Arya, the Athletics Federation of India’s Manager in Operations and Competitions, told PTI. After the revision of the results, Manipur’s Ningthoukhongja (44:04.11) was given the silver medal while Assam’s Bikram Das (44:07.61) was elevated to the third place. Uttarakhand’s Suraj Panwar won the gold in a time of 41:17.40. In other events, Uttarakhand’s Reshma Patel rewrote the girls under-18 5000m national record. The 16-year-old Reshma clocked 23 minutes 38.57 seconds to lower KT Neena’s earlier under-18 record of 24:11.70 set in Goa in 2014. Reshma had shattered the national U-20 record when she made her debut in the 10000m race walk in the Federation Cup Junior U-20 Athletics Championships in Bhopal on January 26. The Dehradun girl had competition from Rupali (Uttar Pradesh) and Deepika Sharma (Rajasthan) but did well to pull away from her rivals to post a comfortable win. In an interesting development, the under-18 quartermilers produced better times than the under-20 runners in both the men and women’s finals. Tamil Nadu’s S Barath and Haryana’s Kapil both clocked sub-48 second times in the boys under-18 final while Priya Habbathanahally Mohan (Karnataka) and Summy (Haryana) dipped in under-56 seconds in the girls under-18 final. Delhi sprinters Ritik Malik and Taranjeet Kaur won the under-20 men and women 100m races respectively while the title of the corresponding fastest under-18 athletes were captured by Anshul (Delhi) and Avantika Santosh Narale (Maharashtra). Dheeraj Kumar Pahadi (Jharkhand) won the boys under-16 100m crown. Saniya Mahendra Sawant (Maharashtra) won the 100m race in under-16 category, edging out her state-mate Siya Abhijit Sawant and Soumita Paul (West Bengal) by one-hundredth of a second.