Ganemat Sekhon scripted history with India’s first ever ISSF World Cup medal in women’s skeet. The 20-year-old shooter won her first senior World Cup medal when she bagged bronze on the third competition day of the tournament in Delhi on Sunday.

This took India’s medal tally to nine at the World Cup at home.

Ranked 82 in the world, she shot 40 to finish third at the Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range. The other Indian in the six-women final, 19-year-old Karttiki Singh Shaktawat, finished in fourth position after an impressive start, shooting 32.

Occupying the second position for a long time, Sekhon missed three birds successively, leaving Great Britain’s Amber Hill and Zoya Kravchenko of Kazakhstan to fight for the gold medal in an exciting final where nobody was willing to give an inch.

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Hill held her nerves to eventually run away with the gold medal after a shoot-off with Kravchenko.

Sekhon was third in the qualification with 117, while Shaktawat was fourth with 116. India’s Parinaaz Dhaliwal was ninth with 108.

In 2018, Sekhon had become the first Indian woman to win a skeet medal at the ISSF World Championship, as she claimed the bronze medal in the junior event in Sydney, Australia.

Having started shooting on the insistence of her father Amrinder Singh Sekhon in 2015, the youngster completed her hat-trick of silver medals in the senior National Shooting Championship when she won the silver medal in the 2018 championship at Jaipur.

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In the selection trials held at KSSR in January, Sekhon had topped qualifying with a score of 120, which was a huge six points ahead of second place.

In the finals of that trials, the Chandigarh-based shooter shot 55, which was a clear four points ahead of second-placed Zahra Deesawala.

Sekhon also competed in the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia, where she finished 10th.

With PTI Inputs