Fact-Check: Hima Das Hasn't Won a Gold at CWG 2022 Yet, The Video is Old

The video is from 2018 when Hima Das won gold in women’s 400m final race in Finland.

The claims state that Hima Das won gold in CWG 2022.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A 2:20-minute video is being widely shared on social media with the claim that Indian sprinter Hima Das clinched gold at the ongoing Commonwealth Games (CWG) 2022, being held in Birmingham from 28 July-8 August.

This was followed by former Indian cricketer Virender Sehwag, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national spokesperson Sambit Patra congratulating the sprinter for her " gold win". Though the tweets were later deleted.

However, we found that the video is from 2018 when Das had scripted history by clinching the top spot in the women’s 400m final race in the IAAF World Under-20 Athletics Championships in Tampere, Finland.

Interestingly, Sehwag had tweeted congratulating her on the "incredible, historic achievement" back in 2018.

The track and field event, in which Das is participating, is yet to begin.

CLAIM

A user named Pegasus shared the video on Twitter on 30 July along with the caption, "Hima Das wins 400m gold in CWG at Birmingham. (sic)"

The video had over 1.5 million views at the time of writing this article.

An archive of the tweet can be seen here. 

Meanwhile, Sehwag had tweeted, “What a win! Indian athletes have totally arrived. Many congratulations to Hima Das on winning gold in the 400m at the Commonwealth Games. Fakr Hai (we are proud)." (Archive here)

He later deleted the tweet.

An archive of the tweet can be seen here. 

More archived links from Facebook and Twitter can be seen here, here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

With the help of InVid, a video verification tool, we extracted several keyframes from the video, and conducted a reverse image search on some of them.

A reverse image search along with keywords led us to a news article published in Financial Express on 13 July 2018, where Das could be seen wearing the same attire.

The article said that Das had scripted history by becoming the first Indian woman athlete to win a gold at the world level as she clinched the top spot in the women’s 400m final race in the IAAF World Under-20 Athletics Championships in Tampere, Finland.

Das had clocked 51.46s to win the gold.

We also found the video on the Facebook page of Athletics Federation of India (AFI) from 13 July 2018.

The video's title read, 'Watch: Hima's historic race- The new 400m world Jr champ.' It has over 6.6 million views.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of the video from 2018 and the viral video which is being shared now.

Viral video (L), Screengrab from Athletics Federation of India (R). 

Clearly, a video from 2018 is being shared on social media with the false claim that Das won gold at CWG 2022.

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