Pistol teams win double gold in ISSF Shooting World Cup
The terrific trio of Yashaswini Singh Deswal, Manu Bhaker and Shri Nivetha won the top prize in the women's team 10m air pistol event
New Delhi: Skeet shooter Ganemat Sekhon won her maiden senior ISSF World Cup medal after a dominant India claimed both the gold on offer by some distance in the men’s and women’s 10m air pistol team events respectively here on Sunday. Sekhon bagged the women’s skeet bronze on the third competition day of the tournament.
Before that, the terrific trio of Yashaswini Singh Deswal, Manu Bhaker and Shri Nivetha won the top prize in the women’s team 10m air pistol event. Then, the team of Youth Olympics and Asian Games gold medallist Saurabh Chaudhary, Abhishek Verma and Shahzar Rizvi bagged the yellow metal in the men’s event, comfortably beating Vietnam 17-11 in the final.
Away from the sporting action, the number of Covid-19 cases rose to six after two more Indian shooters tested positive for the highly contagious virus. The Indian women shot 16 in the gold medal round to finish way ahead of Poland’s Julita Borek, Joanna Iwona Wawrzonowska and Agnieszka Korejwo, who managed 8 at the Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range.
In the men’s final, Vietnam were represented by Dinh Thanh Nguyen, Quoc Cuong Tran and Xuan Chuyen Phan. Chaudhary and Co led the qualification part two with a total score of 579 while the Vietnamese managed 565. Later in the day, the 20-year-old Sekhon, ranked 82 in the world, shot 40 to clinch the bronze medal on the shotgun range. The other Indian in the six-women final, Karttiki Singh Shaktawat, settled for the fourth position after an impressive start, shooting 32.
However, in the men’s skeet final, Gurjoat Khangura finished sixth with a score of 17. Khangura also qualified in sixth place for the final. Denmark’s Jesper Hansen (58) won the gold medal in men’s skeet ahead of UAE’s Bin Futais Saif (51) and Qatar’s multiple Dakar Rally champion Nasser Saleh al-Attiyah (44).
