The Indian men’s skeet team comprising Anant Jeet Singh Naruka, Gurjoat Khangura and Angad Vir Singh Bajwa, won gold at the 15th Asian Shooting Championship in Changwon, Korea on Wednesday.
India with a combined total of 358 was enough to pip team Korea by a point, with Kazakhstan finishing third. In the individual final, Naruka was fourth and Khangura sixth, thereby missing out on both the individual medals and the two available Paris Olympic quota places.
Sarabjot Singh and Surbhi Rao also won a silver for India in the 10m air pistol mixed team event. They shot a combined 581 in qualification, the same score shot by four other teams including two Chinese pairs who took the top two positions by virtue of greater accuracy.
The Indians were third, but as only one team from a country could make the final, Singh and Rao were drawn to play Li Xue and Liu Jinyao for gold. The Chinese prevailed 16-4 however and the Indians took home silver.
In the junior events, Shubham Bisla and Sainyam won bronze in the 10m air pistol mixed team competition, overcoming Kazakhstan’s Malika Seil and Kiril Tsukanov 16-10 in the first bronze medal match.
Naruka, who recently won silver at the Hangzhou Asiad, shot 33 in the six-man men’s skeet final to finish fourth.
Qatari Rashid Saleh Al-Athba won gold with 53 hits out of 60. While he already had won a Paris quota in earlier competitions, second placed Kim Minsu of Korea and Chinese Taipei’s bronze winner Lee Meng Yuan, took the other two, as Naruka fell short, shooting 33 out of the first 40 targets to bow out in fourth.
Khangura had earlier become the first of the top six to bow out with 15 hits out of the first 20 targets.
Earlier in qualification, Khangura had shot two perfect rounds of 25 to log 121 and make it to the top-six in third position. Naruka had to take the shoot-off route with a qualification round score of 119. He piped Kuwaiti legend Abdullah Alrashidi, who he had gone down to famously in the Hangzhou final, to clinch the sixth and final qualifying spot.
Bajwa shot 118 to miss out, finishing in ninth position.
The women skeet shooters had a tough outing with Ganemat Sekhon finishing best among the four on show. She shot 108 to end 15th overall.
Karttiki Singh Shaktawat and Parinaaz Dhaliwal shot 107 each to end in 17th and 18th positions while Darshna Rathore was 19th with a score of 106. Sekhon, Dhaliwal and Rathore also finished fourth in the team competition with an overall score of 321.
India now has six medals from the Asian Championship including two gold, two silver and two bronze medals each. The squad has also won one Paris quota from the championship so far.
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