Lucknow: With at least nine state championship medals in his kitty since 2019, city lad Agastya Raj Singh has been gunning for glory, quite literally.
A student of Class 12 at La Martiniere College, Agastya, 18, has again brought laurels to the city winning three gold medals in .22 rifle category (50m) in the 43rd UP State Shooting Championship organised in Noida recently. He has also qualified for the national championship in 10m air rifle category.
Agastya won gold medals in junior individual, men’s individual and team categories.
He had also participated in 10m air rifle category in UP State Championship at Meerut in 2019 and bagged a gold medal in men’s team category, and silver in junior (team) and champion of champions in junior (individual) categories.
He also won bronze medals in junior (individual) 50m prone position and men’s (individual) 50m prone position.
Agastya developed a penchant for shooting when he was just 13 and has been winning various state and district championships since then.
However, the biggest opportunity came his way after he joined Lucknow’s Gun for Glory Shooting Academy, run by ace shooter and Olympic bronze-medallist Gagan Narang.
Agastya got selected for Project Leap, a training programme in which 10 young shooters are selected from all over India and then mentored by Narang and his team of best coaches and trainers from across the world.
“My mantra is to stay focused, take no pressure and enjoy what I do,” he says.
BOX
14-yr-old qualifies
for nationals
Lucknow: Rudra Ravi Shankar Gupta, 14, has brought laurels to the city by qualifying the pre-nationals in .22 pistol category during the recently concluded 40th North Zone Shooting Championship in Jaipur. He will now participate in the national championship. Rudra's mother, Archana Shankar Gupta, is also a national level shooter while his father, Ravi Shankar Gupta, is an IAS officer.