Aleksandr Sorokin breaks own 100 km world record by six seconds

Aleksandr Sorokin, ultrarunner from Lithuania, set a new 100-kilometre-world record by running the distance in six hours, five minutes and 35 seconds.

He achieved this new record at the 2023 World’s Fastest Run event in Vilnius, Lithuania, on May 14, 2023.

He improved upon his own previous world record by six seconds at this event. He had set the previous record of 6:05:41 at the Centurion Running Track 100 Mile in Bedford, United Kingdom in April 2022. In a social media post, after breaking the world record, Aleksandr said the new 100 km world record is extremely important to him as it happened in Lithuania and his family and friends were there to watch his performance. “I was promised that this run would be the fastest in the world. That’s how it was, a promise made is extremely important to me,” he said.

Three new national records

A clutch of national records was rewritten over the first weekend of May 2023.

At an event in Havana, Cuba, Praveen Chitravel jumped 17.37 metres to top the podium. In the process, he bettered the earlier national record of 17.30 metres set by Ranjith Maheshwari in 2016. Chitravel achieved the record breaking distance in his fifth jump at Preuba de confrontacion 2023 with a headwind of -1.5m/s, a report on olympics.com said. According to it, the permissible wind assistance for official records is +2.0 m/s. All national records are subject to ratification by the Athletics Federation of India (AFI).

With his record breaking effort, Chitravel has qualified for the World Athletics Championships 2023 due in Budapest over August 19-27. The qualifying mark for the event was 17.20 metres.

Same day, at an event in Los Angeles, USA, Indian athletes, Parul Chaudhary and Avinash Sable, overhauled national records in the 5000 metres for women and men respectively. Chaudhary who clocked 15:10:35 took down the previous national record of 15:15:89 set by Preeja Sreedharan (13 years ago at the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, China) while Sable improved his own national record of 13:25:65 (set at the Sound Running Track Meet in San Juan Capistrano in 2022) with a new timing of 13:19:30. Sable finished twelfth at the meet, a World Athletics Continental Tour silver event. Chaudhary finished ninth, the report on olympics.com said. According to it, Sable also participated in the 10,000 metres but registered a DNF.

All three athletes are from the Inspire Institute of Sport funded by the JSW Group, a report in Times of India said.

(The authors, Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon, are independent journalists based in Mumbai.)