Star Odisha sprinter Dutee Chand spearheaded Indian women 4x100 metre relay team to gold medal on the last day of the 60th National Inter State Senior Athletics Championships at the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports (NSNIS) in Patiala today. Other three runners of the team were AK Daneshwari, Archana Suseendran and S Dhanalakshmi.

Running the final with a changed combination after Hima Das pulled out, the 4x100m relay quartet created a new meet record, clocking 44.15 seconds (Old Record: 45.69, Tamil Nadu, Lucknow 2019). But the team finished well short of its target (43.03 seconds) that could have earned the team a berth in the Olympic Games.

Star sprinter Hima Das, who sustained a hamstring injury while running 100m heats earlier on Saturday, tried gamely to compete in the women 200m final, chasing 22.80 seconds to qualify, but finished fifth in 25.03 seconds.

Woman discus thrower Seema Antil (Uttar Pradesh) stole the show on the final day as qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games with a throw of 63.72m. She became the 12th individual Indian athlete to qualify for Tokyo Games.

Besides Antil, the 4x400m mixed relay squad, Avinash Sable (men 3000m steeplechase), Tajinderpal Singh Toor (men shot put), Neeraj Chopra and Shivpal Singh (men javelin throw), M Sreeshankar (men long jump), Kamalpreet Kaur (women discus throw) and race walkers KT Irfan, Sandeep Kumar and Rahul Rohila (men) and Bhawna Jat and Priyanka Goswami (women) have already qualified for the Olympic Games.

There is expectation that some others like MP Jabir (men 400m hurdles), Dutee Chand (women 200m), Annu Rani (women javelin throw) will make it on the strength of their world ranking. Besides if the men and women relay teams, ranked 13 and 16 on the Road to Olympic Games list at the time of writing, may raise the size of the Indian athletics team.