Apurvi Chandela and Ravi Kumar opened the medal tally for India at the 18th Asian Games by winning a bronze in the 10m air rifle mixed team event.
Apurvi and Ravi scored 429.9 to be placed third in the final comprising five teams.
Chinese Taipei’s Yingshin Lin and Shaochuan Lu won gold, scoring 494.1 (a Games Record) while China’s Ruozhu Zhao and Haoran Yang finished with a silver with a score of 492.5.
Chandela and Kumar qualified for the final in second place after shooting a score of 835.3 in the qualification round.
They had earlier won bronze in the individual categories of the 10m air rifle event at the Commonwealth Games
Apurvi Chandela
Date of Birth: January 4, 1993
Event at Asian Games: women’s 10m air rifle, rifle mixed team
Past performance (if any): Finished 13th in qualification in 2014, Incheon
Best performance so far: Gold, Commonwealth Games 2014
Brief Description: Apurvi Chandela is India’s foremost female shooters since the last few years. She had her first big breakthrough on the international stage when she won the gold at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow with a games record score in qualification and in the finals.
However, she first made her name on the Indian shooting circuit when she became the national champion 2012, in her first year in the senior circuit. The Rajasthan girl had taken up rifle shooting in 2008 inspired by Abhinav Bindra’s Olympic gold medal.
She won her first ISSF World Cup medal in 2015 when she bagged the bronze medal and an Olympic quota place in Changwon, South Korea. In the process, she became the first Indian woman to qualify for the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she finished 34th in qualification. She had also once broken the world record for the finals round when she shot 211.2 to win gold at the Swedish Cup back in 2016.
In 2018, she won the bronze at the Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast. But she narrowly missed her first World Cup gold in a dramatic fashion when finished fourth at the ISSF World Cup in Munich. She shot a shock 5.9 that saw her drop from gold-medal position in a strange turn of events.
Ravi Kumar
Date of Birth: January 1, 1990
Event at Asian Games: men’s 10m air rifle, rifle mixed team
Past performance (if any): Bronze, men’s 10m air rifle team, 2014 Incheon
Best performance so far: Bronze, men’s 10m air rifle Commonwealth Games and ISSF World Cup in Mexico in 2018
Brief Description: Ravi Kumar, who will be playing in both 10m air rifle and mixed team, has been among India’s most consistent rifle shooters in the last year since winning his first international medal, a bronze at the Asian Airgun Championships in 2017. The shooter from Uttar Pradesh, who is affiliated with the Air Force, is the reigning national champion in the event as well.
At the 2014 Asiad, he was part of the team with Abhinav Bindra and Sanjeev Rajput that won the bronze medal in 10m air rifle.
The year 2018 has been a good one for him so far. In March, he bagged his first World Cup medal with a final score of 226.4 beating compatriot Deepak Kumar in a shoot-off in Mexico’s Guadalajara. In April, kept his nerves to win a shoot-off to bag the bronze medal in the men’s 10m Air Rifle event at the Commonwealth Games.
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