Nagpur: The rising athlete Sanjana Joshi of Nagpur has been selected in the Indian team that will participate in the Birmingham Commonwealth Games Triathlon event.
Sanjana will be part of a four-member Indian team (two men and two women) at the Birmingham CWG that will take place from July 28 to August 8. Pragnya Mohan from Ahmedabad is the other woman selected in the Indian team. The Triathlon Federation of India recently announced the four-member Indian team for the Games.
Sanjana, 17, is selected for the Sprint Distance Triathlon, a multi-sport event in which the athlete has to swim 750 metres, then cycle 20 kms and then run for five kms without any break. Sanjana, who is being trained by Dr Amit Samarth, ultra cyclist at Miles and Milers Endurance Sports Academy, is a student of Somalwar Nikalas School. Sanjana attended the selection and evaluation camp organised by Indian Triathlon Federation at Chennai last month. There she participated in the Super sprint distance triathlon and finished second among three short-listed participants, informed Dr Samarth.
Sanjana, who is clocking just over an hour to complete the set of races (swim, cycle and run), wants to better her mark. “I want to log below the one hour mark and for that I am training hard. My favourite event is swimming which I have been doing since childhood. But I want to do better in the other two departments also,” said Sanjana who will also be taking part in the Asian Sprint Triathlon Championship which is going to be held at Sejong South Korea from June 4.
At the Pokhara event in Nepal last month, Sanjana won a silver medal. She completed the triathlon distance in 1 hour 10 minutes and 8 seconds to finish as the second best among other participants from Japan, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Austria. In duathlon, her elder sister 19-year-old Snehal, a first year Mechanical Engineering student of Government Engineering College, won silver with a timing of 1 hour 6 minutes and 56 seconds.
Similarly, in the Asian Triathlon Cup, both the sisters had finished in the top 20 bracket. Both sisters were also selected for the trials for Asian Games, which was supposed to be held at Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China in September but now has been postponed due to COVID in that country. Miles and Milers Endurance Sports Academy will be sponsoring Sanjana at the South Korean Championship.
