Harishankar Roy clears 2.2 m at the Salt Lake Stadium on Saturday. Picture by Santosh Ghosh

Calcutta, June 5: After two quiet days, the 54th state athletics championships came alive on Saturday with 13 meet records being erased at the Salt Lake Stadium and SAI complex. The best of them came late in the day when Jalpaiguri boy Harishankar Roy cleared 2.20 m in the men’s high jump — 3 cm clear of the national record which stands in the name of Chandrapal.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, Harishankar’s mark won’t be recognised as a national record as these state meets don’t fulfil the criterion set by the AFI to be treated as national-level competitions.

“Firstly, there’s no AFI observer present here and then, there are no dope tests done randomly or of the winners,” pointed out a senior official. “We can send the result to the AFI, but it’s almost improbable that it will be ratified.”

Officially a record or not, it was a high-class performance by Harishankar. He first cleared his own meet mark (2.07 set last year), then went past his previous personal best (2.12, which he did twice) before jumping clear of Chandrapal’s 2.17 (January 1993 in Bangalore).

His next aim was 2.20, which he successfully cleared on his second attempt. Getting ambitious (“I was eyeing the 2.25 mark”), the 18-year-old asked the bar to be raised to 2.24 which proved to be out of bounds.

The experienced Mukti Saha earlier in the afternoon completed a 100-200 women’s double with a record dash in the longer sprint. Mukti’s timing of 23.5 seconds bettered her own 24.2 of last year.

Another impressive record-breaker was Sushmita Singha Roy. By logging 5,211 points, she became the first to break the 5,000-point barrier in heptathlon in a state meet. “I knew she would win but didn’t expect her to do so well,” said coach Kuntal Roy, who also trains Soma Biswas. Incidentally, Olympic hopeful Soma did not compete in heptathlon here.

There was a record in girls under-18 heptathlon, too, with Safina Khatun tallying 3610 points. The eight other individual meet records rewritten today were by Sabina Khatun (girls under-18 200m), Antana Khatun (girls under-16 pentathlon), Jhuma Khatun (girls under-18 800m), Esmatara Khatun (girls under-20 800m), Biswajit Dey (boys under-20 shot put), Manisha Mondal (women’s javelin) and Tanmoy Adhikary (boys under-16 high jump).

Debasish Das emerged the fastest man of the meet, running 100m in 10.6 seconds.