Asian Shooting Championship: Indian men's skeet team beat Korea to clinch gold medal

New Delhi: The Indian men’s trio of Anant Jeet Singh Naruka, Gurjoat Khangura and Angad Vir Singh Bajwa won the gold medal with a combined total of 358 in men’s skeet team event of the Asian Shooting Championship in Changwon, South Korea. The Indians’ aggregate score was enough to pip the Korean team by a point, while Kazakhstan finished third. Naruka and Khangura also made the individual final but missed out on medals, and the two available Paris Olympic quota places, after finishing fourth and sixth respectively. Sarabjot Singh and Surbhi Rao also won a silver for India on the day. 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, Sarabjot and Surbhi were drawn to play Li Xue and Liu Jinyao for gold. The Chinese prevailed 16-4, and the Indians took home silver. In the junior events, India’s 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 won silver at the Hangzhou Asian Games, 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 medal winner Lee Meng Yuan, took the other two, as Naruka fell short, shooting 33 out of the first 40 targets. 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 in the Hangzhou Asian Games final, to settle for the sixth and final qualifying spot. Angad Bajwa shot 118 to miss out, finishing in ninth position. The Indian 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 respectively, while Darshna Rathore was 19th with a score of 106. Ganemat, Parinaaz and Darshna finished fourth in the team competition with an overall score of 321.