BAHRAIN had another hugely successful day at the 18th Asian Games in Jakarta adding two more gold and a bronze to swell their medal tally to 12 – six gold, three silver and three bronze.
Oluwakemi Adekoya set the ball rolling on another roller coaster day racing to victory in the women’s 400m hurdles with a new Asian Games record of 54.48 seconds and to make it double sweet her compatriot Aminat Jamal won the bronze in 55.65, behind second-placed Quach Thi Lan of Vietnam.
A little later, the diminutive but ever-smiling Winfred Yavi made the women’s 3,000m steeplechase all her own and won it with consummate ease in 9:36.52 minutes to take Bahrain’s gold medal haul to the half-dozen mark.
India’s Sudha Singh and Vietnam’s Nguyen Thi Oanh finished second and third.
Bahrain made further inroads in other athletic events to raise hopes of returning from Jakarta with their biggest medal haul in the history of Asian Games.
In 2014 Bahrain returned from Incheon, South Korea, with 19 medals – nine gold, six silver and four bronze – and four years earlier, in Guangzhou, China, they claimed nine medals – five gold and four bronze.
With 11 medals, Bahrain are in 12th place in the medals tally, ahead of all other GCC countries featured in the table.
UAE are 15th (three gold, six silver, three bronze), Qatar 17th (3-3-1), Kuwait 23rd (2-1-0) and Saudi Arabia 30th (0-2-1)
Marta Yota and Manal Elbahraoui advanced to the women’s 800m final set for today while Abraham Rotich made it to the final of the corresponding men’s event.
But there was major disappointment in the men’s 3,000m steeplechase as Bahraini pair of John Koech and Evans Chematot faded away after promising starts.
Koech finished fourth in 8:32.72 and Chematot sixth in 8:36.60.
The race was brilliantly won by Hossein Keyhani (8:22.79, a Games record) while Yaser Bagharab (8:28.21) of Qatar and Kazuya Shiojiri (8:29.42) of Japan claimed the silver and bronze medals respectively.
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