Sport - Swimming

Arjun raring to go

PANAJI: Arjun Muralidharan, who was the ‘best swimmer’ of the last senior Nationals held at Bangalore, is back for an encore at Panaji, which is all set for the Senior National championship which begins on Wednesday.

“It will be nice to win again,” said Arjun, who has been training in Manchester for the past seven months under noted English coach, Shaun Kelly.

“It is good to be back home and be in the thick of action,” said Arjun, who aims to swim in all his five favourite events — the 50,100 and 200 metres butterfly and the 50 and 100 metre backstroke events.

Arjun said that he had been training hard. “I have never logged as many miles as I did in Manchester where the training was pretty intensive and the load was quite heavy,” said the swimmer from Pune, who represents Police in the championship. Arjun also had a fruitful outing at the Manchester Open, where he won a gold. “I clocked 2:07 and I want to bring it down here,” said the 20-year-old ace, looking very fit and raring to go.

Another early bird at the Campal pool on Monday was the women’s champion Richa Misra, who had every reason to be pleased with her show in the open events of the Asian age-group meet at Jakarta recently. Richa won the 400m individual medley, the 200m individual medley and the 200m butterfly, all with new Indian best timings and her 400m IM and her 200 IM, also were the new meet marks at the AAG championship.

“I am confident doing better here and I know it is not going to be easy, there is stiff competition ahead,” said Richa.

Incidentally, Richa’s sister Charu Misra, a freestyle distance specialist, who had recently sustained a fracture, has opted out of the meet.

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