Godamanna, Dineshkanthan win tennis singles:

Mithun renews Lanka’s medal hopes

Dinesh WEERAWANSA reporting from China

Golfer Mithun Perera renewed Sri Lanka’s medal hopes with a superior performance in the golf championships of the 16th Asian Games begun at the Dragon Lake Golf Club today. Perera, the overall captain of the Sri Lanka contingent, had a great day of golf to secure the second place on completion of the first round worked off under ideal weather conditions.

He gave glimpses of his father Nandasena Perera, who created history. Incidentally, it was exactly 20 years ago here in China that Mithun’s father Nandasena bagged a men’s individual silver medal in golf at the 1990 Beijing Asian Games.

Thanks to Mithun Perera’s efforts, Sri Lanka is currently placed third in the team championship with a total of 223, behind South Korea (210) and the Philippines (218).

Tennis

Davis Cup player Harshana Godamanna and Thangaraja Dineshkanthan injected the ‘victory feeling’ to the Sri Lanka contingent when they entered the men’s singles second round of the 16th Asian Games tennis tournament Aoti Tennis Centre here today.

Godamanna stormed in to the second round of the men’s singles with a smashing straight sets win over Fahad Al Saad of Saudi Arabia in 43 minutes. Having conceded only two points to his opponent in the first set, serving an ace, Godamanna completely tied down his opponent in the second set to register a smart 6-2, 6-0 win. Godamanna will now meet China’s Di Wu, the eighth seed, in the next round. “It was nice to win and I hope to play my best in the second round,” he said after the triumph.

Godamanna’s team mate Dineshkanthan too had a straight sets win in the first round and advanced to the second round. Dineshkanthan took 56 minutes to overpower Jamshed Ilumuradov of Turkmenistan 6-2, 6-2. However, Dineshkanthan is bound to face an acid test when he meets fourth seeded Tatsuma Ito of Japan in the second round.

However, Sri Lanka lost its men’s doubles tie to China at the center court in the afternoon. Dineshkanthan and Vimukthi de Alwis could offer little resistance in going down to China’s Yan Bai and Ze Zhang 6-0, 6-3. The scores were tied three-all at one stage of the second set but the Chinese duo made sure that they would not take the game into the third set with a good fight back.

Badminton and taekwondo

In the absence of his brother and Sri Lanka No.1 Niluka Karunaratne, who is serving a one-year suspension, Dinuka Karunaratne did well to enter the second round of the men’s singles. Even then, Dinuka Karunaratne was lucky to have a relatively weak opponent in Maldivian Ajfaan Ajfaan whom he beat 21-17, 21-8. At the Guangdong Gymnasium today, Sri Lanka’s Gayan Kumara lost his men’s 87kg taekwondo first round bout to Yazan Alsadeq of Jordan in a 2:13 points decision.

Sailing and rowing

For the fourth successive day, Sri Lanka’s sailors continued their lean run and failed to justify their journey to China. They came out with yet another miserable performance in their respective round 7 events worked off at Shanwei Water Sports Center.

Madhavi Kaushalya Weeratunga made another contribution to the pathetic performance of the Lankan swimmers when she finished last in her women’s 100m freestyle heat 1 worked off at Aoti Aquatic Centre. She clocked a poor timing of one minute and 56.18 seconds to finish sixth and the last in her heat, won by Japan’s Haruka Ueda in only 55.47 seconds.

Kazakhstan pair of Tatyana and Irina appeared to be too strong for Lankan lasses Geethika and Sujeewa in their Pool ‘D’ women’s beach volleyball preliminary round match worked off at the Asian Games Town BWC. The Kazakhstan duo beat Sri Lanka in straight sets 21-12, 21-13 in a 28-minute job.

Shooting

Arch rivals South and North Korea shared two gold medals each out of the five that were on offer in shooting. With a total of 1,708 points, South Korea won the gold medal in men’s 25m standard pistol team event. Their achievement was mainly due to the sharp eye of Hong Seonghwan who aggregated 575 points to bag the individual title of the men’s 25m standard pistol shooting event.