Skip to main content

Atuobeng Sets Shot Put Meet Record - National University Individual Track and Field Championships Day Two



Following a record-breaking Day 1, the National University Individual Track and Field Championships continued Saturday at Kanagawa's Lemon Gas Stadium. 2nd-year Jason Atuobeng (Fukuoka Univ.) turned in the performance of the day, throwing a 20 cm PB on his final attempt to break the men's shot put meet record with a winning throw of 18.42 m. The 20-year-old Atuobeng, who broke 18 m for the first time last month, came in at all-time Japanese #7, and with just 24 cm to go to the collegiate record and 41 cm to the national record he's due to be one of the highest-potential Japanese men on the field over the next few years.

2nd-year Hanae Aoyama (Konan Univ.), 19, had the women's performance of the day, missing the women's 100 m meet record by just 0.02 as she won the final in a PB 11.50 (+1.0). That was enough to move her up to #6 on the Japanese all-time collegiate list. Nagisa Takahashi, one of the just-graduated athletes still allowed to compete in the meet, won the women's high jump at 1.80 m, missing the meet record by just 1 cm.

Other Day 2 action:
  • 1st-year Hiroki Yanagita (Toyo Univ.) won the men's 100 m final in 10.30 (+1.6), following in the footsteps of Toyo alum and meet record holder Yoshihide Kiryu.
  • 3rd-year Shizuho Moriyama (Fukuoka Univ.) won the women's 400 m final in 55.77.
  • 4th-year Ryuki Iwasaki (Osaka Taiiku) scored one for the Kansai region with a 46.47 win in the men's 400 m final.
  • Sho Watanabe, another recent grad, won the men's high jump, clearing 2.16 m.
  • 2nd-year Ikkei Yoshino added another win to Kyushu Kyoritsu University's haul, taking the men's javelin throw with a 74.09 m throw on his 2nd attempt.
  • 2nd-year Kana Koide (Juntendo Univ.) won the women's 10000 m RW in 47:31.05 by 9 seconds over Hitomi Shimooka (Doshisha Univ.).
  • Recent grad Maoko Takashima jumped a wind-aided 13.52 m (+4.1) on her final attempt to take the women's triple jump.
  • 4th-year Fumika Ono (Saitama Univ.) won the women's shot put with an opening throw of 15.02 m.
  • Jun Taue, another unattached athlete, won the decathlon with a score of 7371.
  • Nittai University grad Karin Odama won the heptathlon in 5547.
The National University Individual Track and Field Championships wrap up Sunday.

© 2022 Brett Larner, all rights reserved

Buy Me A Coffee

Comments

Most-Read This Week

Heisei Mountaineering Stops Takigahara SDF Base From Scoring 10-Year Streak at Mount Fuji Ekiden

by Koichi Iwasa of DogsorCaravan On Aug. 2 the 51st Mount Fuji Ekiden took place, starting and finishing in Gotemba, Shizuoka and covering 11 stages up to the peak of Mount Fuji and back down. Teams of 6 runners tackle the tough course, each running handling one uphill and one downhill leg with the 6th runner reaching the peak before turning around to head back to the exchange zone where they started. The Heisei Mountaineering Club team took the overall win in 3:50:39, beating 9-time winner Takigahara SDF Base by 2:07 and stopping them from achieving a 10-year victory streak. The independent team division and SDF team division were separated in 2005, and this was the first time that the winning independent team outran the fastest SDF team to take the overall title. The roster that Heisei Mountaineering put together for this year's race raised eyebrows among everyone familiar with the Japanese trail running scene. Handling the 5th and 7th legs was Ruy Ueda , winner of the Fuji M...

Komazawa University One Step Away From Perfect Season With Hakone Ekiden Day One Win

Already the course record-breaker at the Izumo Ekiden and National University Ekiden this season, 2021 Hakone Ekiden champion Komazawa University came one step away from its first-ever triple crown of single-season ekiden wins as it won a highly competitive 2023 Hakone Ekiden Day One over defending champ Aoyama Gakuin University and last year's 6th placer Chuo University . Things got off to an unexpected start when Select Team runner Hayate Nitta of non-qualifier Ikuei University decided to take his one and only Hakone shot and run it up to his ability on the 21.3 km 1st leg even though the rest of the field opted to jog. At one point Nitta had a lead of almost a minute and a half, but as beautiful as it would have been for him to pull it off, Meiji University 's Shunpei Tomita and Komazawa's Kensuke Tsubura still managed to run him down in the final kilometer. Tomita took the stage win in 1:02:44, 1:02:08 half marathon pace vs. his 1:02:10 PB despite the slow s...

How it Happened

Ancient History I went to Wesleyan University, where the legend of four-time Boston Marathon champ and Wes alum Bill Rodgers hung heavy over the cross-country team. Inspired by Koichi Morishita and Young-Cho Hwang’s duel at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics I ran my first marathon in 1993, qualifying for Boston ’94 where Bill was kind enough to sign a star-struck 20-year-old me’s bib number at the expo. Three years later I moved to Japan for grad school, and through a long string of coincidences I came across a teenaged kid named Yuki Kawauchi down at my neighborhood track. I never imagined he’d become what he is, but right from the start there was just something different about him. After his 2:08:37 breakthrough at the 2011 Tokyo Marathon he called me up and asked me to help him get into races abroad. He’d finished 3rd on the brutal downhill Sixth Stage at the Hakone Ekiden, and given how he’d run the hills in the last 6 km at Tokyo ’11 I thought he’d do well at Boston or New York. “I...