New Delhi: The trailblazing teenaged duo of Saurabh Chaudhary and Manu Bhaker comfortably claimed the gold medal in the 10m air pistol mixed team event of the ISSF World Cup here Wednesday. The Indian pair shot a total of 483.5 to finish on top of the podium to finish the tournament with a flourish after a few results that did not go their way over the last three days.
The Chinese duo of Ranxin Jiang and Bowen Zhang won silver with 477.7, while the bronze went to the Korean pair of Minjung Kim and Daehun Park (418.8) at the Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range. Such was the Indian duo’s dominance through the final that the difference between gold and silver medallist at the end was a hopping at the end was 5.8.
Having entered the final after equalling the qualification world record, Saurabh and Manu continued in the same vein and once they moved to the top spot, there was no looking back as they consistently shot high and mid 10. The other Indian team in the fray, Heena Sidhu and Abhishek Verma, could not clear the qualification hurdle.
The Indian shooters in 10m air rifle mixed team event, Ravi Kumar and Anjum Moudgil and Apurvi Chandela and Deepak Kumar finished seventh and 25th respectively. India jointly topped the standings with Hungary with three gold medals, but managed to secure only one Olympic quota. The tournament offered 14 quota places for the 2020 Tokyo Games.
Medal winners in Men’s 25m Rapid Fire Pistol event will be reimbursed any expenses they may have incurred during the New Delhi World Cup by the International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF). The International Olympic Council (IOC) had revoked Olympic quotas from the event after two Pakistani shooters were not granted visas by the Indian government to travel to New Delhi for the event.
The event was originally supposed to give out two Tokyo 2020 Olympic games quota places but the same were revoked as per an International Olympic Council (IOC) decision just before competitions began. A three-member Pakistani team, comprising two pistol shooters and a manager, was scheduled to arrive in Delhi on Wednesday for the World Cup, which is also a qualifying event for next year’s Tokyo Olympics.