Tintu Luka fails to make 2016 Olympics cut despite winning at Federation cup

National champion for the 800-meter race, Tintu Luka has missed out on a Rio 2016 berth despite winning the women's event in the Federation cup event held at Mangalore on Sunday.

Tintu, went through the bell at 58 secs, managed to clock 2:04.14 to ensure her place for the national squad but fails to materialize her ambition of making the Rio Olympics standard that stands at 2:01.00. As expected, National Games champion Abhishek N Shetty (Karnataka) won the decathlon with 6630 points. V V Raneesh (Gujarat, 6391 pts) and R Suren of Indian Bank (6264 pts) finished second and third respectively. 

Abhishek garnered 6805 points to win in Thiruvananthapuram. Odisha athletes Amiya Kumar Mallick and Srabani Nanda had become the fastest man and woman of the meet by taking the 100m gold in 10.56 and 11.59 secs respectively.

In the men's race Mallick, who underwent a training stint under Olympian Usain Bolt's coach, Glenn Mills at Jamaica, pipped defending champion Jyoti Shankar Debnath at the tape while both the athletes clocked an identical 10.56s but the former was declared as a winner in photo-finish. Krishna Kumar Rane of Maharashtra went home with the bronze in 10.58 secs.

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Interestingly Srabani Nanda, the silver medalist in Fed Cup in the last four editions, got off from the blocks first and made it a memorable evening as she equaled her legal best time of 11.59 secs to secure the gold and also qualify for the Asians. Ironically her state-mate Dutee Chand, a pre-race favourite to win the top spot, could manage only 11.86 secs and hence settled with a silver slightly ahead of Karnataka's M G Padmini (11.89s).

Long jumper Ankit Sharma, who used to represent Madhya Pradesh in the last three editions of the Fed Cup but changed colour to Haryana this year, went on to win his fourth straight title with a 7.99m leap. While winning his gold medal at the National Games earlier this year Ankit leapt a personal best 8.04m.

Interestingly national record-holder Kumaravel Premkumar, currently in a training stint at United States, also leaped to 8.04m in recent week and also delivered two identical 8.01m jumpts to win a silver medal in the 21st Adidas Steve Scott Invitational meet at Irvine on Saturday.

Earlier in the morning former national record-holder L Deepmala Devi, representing Karnataka, had won the women's 20 km race walk with a time 1 hour 44 minutes and 29 secs, the slowest winning time in four years.