Shanti Pereira kept the Asian Games 200m. No woman had done that.
She ran 22.78 in the rain in Nagoya, 0.15 ahead of Chen Yujie. The 100m gold went the other way on Friday.
Shanti Pereira in the Hangzhou 200 metres final on Oct. 2, 2023, the race she won in 23.03. Sunday's gold in Nagoya made her the first woman to keep the title.
Photo: Chensiyuan / CC BY-SA 4.0
Shanti Pereira ran 22.78 in the rain at Paloma Mizuho Stadium on Sunday and kept the Asian Games 200 metres, the first woman to win the race twice. Chen Yujie, who had taken the 100 metres off her on Friday, was second in 22.93. India's Harita Bhadra took bronze in 23.20.
Chen left first. Pereira and Bhadra were slower out of the bend, the way this race often starts when the 17-year-old in the next lane has already run 11.06. Pereira came past in the second half and held Chen off. Her fiancé, Tan Zong Yang, a former national 400-metre runner, watched her pull away with tears in his eyes.
That was the point of the week. Chen had just become the fastest woman in these Games over 100 metres, a Games record. Pereira is 30. She took silver in 11.21, a hundredth off her national record, then came back to the event she actually prefers. Her 200-metre national record is 22.57. Saturday, in the heats, she ran 23.10 and went to bed exhausted.
"I'm so exhausted from all my races. I honestly hadn't been sleeping very well, probably from anxiety and just nerves," she said. "But I knew that the mind is just such a powerful thing, if I believed and just let my body flow, I could bring it back home for Singapore."
Her parents, Clarence and Jeet, had not been sleeping either. Friday made it worse. "The 200m and the 100m are different," Clarence told CNA. They were right about which race was hers.
She did this double in Hangzhou in 2023 as well: silver in the 100, then the 200 in 23.03, Singapore's first athletics gold since Chee Swee Lee's 400 metres in 1974. Five men have gone back-to-back in the 200 since the Games started in 1951. She is the first woman to do it. She now has four Asian Games medals — two silvers in the 100, two golds in the 200.
A fibula stress injury at the start of 2024 wrecked her Paris year. She went out in the heats in both sprints. She has said her younger self used to be scared of everyone in the next lane. On Sunday she asked her coach, Cunha, a former Olympic sprinter, to come off the practice track and into the stadium. She wanted him to see it.
"Coming into today, I knew it was my day," she said. "Nothing was going to stop me from getting it."
"They are the ones that believed when I didn't," she said of the people around her. She had already lost the 100. The 200 was the one she came to keep.