Maana Patel lent a touch of class to the swimming competition by winning the women’s 200m backstroke with a time of 2 minutes 23.00 seconds at the Balewadi Complex here on Sunday.
However, the 18-year-old from Ahmedabad could not stop Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu from overtaking Gujarat in the 4x100m medley relay.
With a struggle for fixing the photo finish pad on the pool affecting smooth conduct of the races, Maana asked the technical officials to lower the touch pad that was above the water level.
The request was acceded to promptly, but it was a jarring note when race after race the touch pad had to be lowered into the pool and brought out, possibly leading to a manual stopping of the clock in many cases.
Srihari Nataraj tackled the issue without any fuss by crouching high for the diving start and collected one more gold medal in the men’s 200m backstroke, ahead of Karnataka teammate Siva Sridhar.
Maharashtra was marginally ahead of Delhi in the medals tally. It had 14 gold, nine silver and six bronze to the latter’s 14 gold, eight silver and 11 bronze.
Karnataka was third with 12 gold, 12 silver and seven bronze followed by Tamil Nadu with six gold, seven silver and three bronze.
Kushagra Rawat, Anurag Singh and Swadesh Mondal accounted for Delhi’s gold collection on Sunday in freestyle and medley events.
Maharashtra was well served by Vedant Bapna, Yuga Birnale, Kenisha Gupta and its women’s medley relay team.
Suvana Baskar and the women’s medley relay team won gold for Karnataka, apart from Srihari Nataraj.
