Bhubaneswar (Odisha) [India], August 9 (ANI): Top Indian monitor and subject athletes from the nation will lock horns with worldwide stars on the Indian Open 2025 World Athletics Bronze Level Continental Tour meet, which is scheduled to happen on the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar on Sunday.
Dubbed as the primary Indian Open, it is going to be the maiden World Athletics Bronze Level Continental Tour athletics meet hosted by India, as per Olympics.com.
Organised yearly by World Athletics, the Continental Tour is an annual sequence of monitor and subject competitions. It is the second tier of worldwide conferences after the elite Diamond League.
Established in 2020, the Continental Tour has 4 ranges – gold, silver, bronze and challenger.
A World Athletics Continental Tour occasion on dwelling soil can be a golden alternative for Indian athletes to earn beneficial rating factors and provides their possibilities of qualifying for subsequent month’s World Athletics Championships in Tokyo a lift.
Home situations may give them a powerful edge of their bid to satisfy the qualification requirements for direct entry to the World Championships.
Though javelin ace Neeraj Chopra and the injured Avinash Sable will not be competing in Bhubaneswar, the first Indian Open World Athletics Bronze Level Continental Tour will characteristic among the prime monitor and subject stars from the nation.
The checklist contains the quickest Indian on monitor, Animesh Kujur, who now owns the nationwide data in each males’s 100m and 200m sprints. However, he could have stiff competitors from Malaysian nationwide document holder Muhammad Azeem Fahmi.
Long jumper Murali Sreeshankar has been on a three-event profitable streak since coming back from damage earlier this yr, and the Asian and Commonwealth Games silver medallist will look to construct up extra steam within the lead-up to Tokyo25.
Mohammed Afsal, the boys’s 800m nationwide document holder, may also be in motion in Bhubaneswar alongside Shaili Singh (ladies’s lengthy soar), Vithya Ramraj (ladies’s 400m) and a number of other others.
With Neeraj out, Asian Athletics Championships silver medallist Sachin Yadav and Yashvir Singh will entrance the Indian problem within the males’s javelin throw.
However, Sri Lankan thrower Rumesh Pathirage, who pipped Sachin to the bronze on the NC Classic in Bengaluru final month, can also be within the fray.
Annu Rani may also compete in ladies’s javelin throw whereas Abdulla Aboobacker and Jeswin Aldrin are within the males’s triple and lengthy soar entry lists, respectively.
Over 90 Indians can be in motion on the Indian Open 2025 in Bhubaneswar, together with worldwide athletes from 16 totally different international locations.
A complete of 17 medal occasions – 9 for males and eight for girls – can be held on the Indian Open 2025 World Athletics Bronze Level Continental Tour in Bhubaneswar. (ANI)