Ludhiana: H. Jayachandran and Poonam Tomar won the men’s and women’s 100-metre race, respectively, to emerge the fastest athletes in the third national athletics circuit meet held Tuesday.

Railways’ Poonam powered her way through from start to finish at the Guru Nanak Stadium to win in 11.60 seconds to complete a hattrick following her wins in New Delhi and Patiala in the first two meets.

KM Greeshma, also of Railways, gave a spirited challenge, but had to be content with the second spot with a timing of 11.97 seconds.

Mandeep Kaur of Punjab clocked 12.20 seconds to finish third.

The men’s dash saw Jayachandran (10.51) of LIC pip Piyush Kumar by 0.1 second to post his second consecutive win of the season. Vishal Saxena (Railways, 10.57) came third.

However, Piyush (21.35 seconds) extracted revenge in the 200m, pushing Jayachandran (21.67) to second spot. The third place went to Abhishek Pandey (LIC, 21.76).

But in the overall tabulation Piyush’s effort got him the prize money cheque for only the second place as Vishal Saxena had clocked a better time of 21.21 seconds to win the 200m B race.

The women’s 400m hurdles saw Chitra K. Soman begin her campaign for international honours in right earnest clocking a career best time of 57.70s.

There was none to push her in the race that had only three runners. (PTI)