Athletics: Irfan walks the walk and achieves top ten finish

Irfan Kolothum Thodi, at the young age of 22, made his entire country proud and recorded a top ten finish in the Men’s 20km Race Walk at the London Olympics.

The young athlete from Kerala finished at 10th place while his fellow countrymen Gurmeet Singh and Baljinder Singh finished at 33rd and 43rd positions respectively. Thodi broke the national record and finished the race at 1:20:21.

It was quite a challenging race as eight racewalkers found themselves out of the event including the Russian Valeriy Borchin who collapsed all of a sudden while he was cruising at 2nd place.

Ding Chen from China finished at 1st place(1:18:46), Erick Barrondo at 2nd (1:18:57) and Zhen Wang (1:19:25) completed the top three positions of the race.

Thodi, who was not even among the top twenty racewalkers during the first half of the race, picked up pace and left most of his opponents behind.

The young Indian has certainly walked the walk!