Asian Games: Indian women shooters save the blushes with bronze after flop show in pistol, rifle

India's unheralded women shooters nailed the bronze in team double trap at the faraway Gyeonggido range in the 17th Asian Games in Incheon on Thursday, the seventh medal in the discipline gained by the country so far.

However, for the second successive day India drew a blank at the nearby Ongnyeon pistol and rifle range where hot shot Gagan Narang made his appearance and flopped individually as well as collectively with his team-mates in 50m rifle prone event.

Pistol shooters Gurpreet Singh, Mahaveer Singh and seasoned Samaresh Jung too disappointed. Had it not been for the bronze won by the double trap women's trio of Shagun Chowdhary, Shreyasi Singh and Varsha Varman, the shooting events would have ended for the day without a medal.

Shagun aggregated 96 out of 120 shots to finish 8th out of 19 starters, Shreyasi fell to the 10th spot with a score of 94 while Varsha did even worse with a four-round tally of 89.

However, their combined effort fetched them a score of 279, which was far behind gold medal winners and world record setters China's 315 or silver medal winners Korea's 324. India, though, were comfortably ahead of fourth-placed Chinese Taipei's 268.

Shagun's sequence was 24, 25, 24 and 23 while Shreyasi and Varsha came up with 24, 22, 22, 26 and 23, 21, 24, 21. The individual gold was won by Korea's Kim Mijin with a world record score of 110.
Earlier, there was a medal drought at the nearby shooting range.

Commonwealth Games silver medallist Gagan Narang failed to live up to his reputation after starting off with a bang – two 10.8s in the 50m rifle prone qualification – before going off target and finishing with a disappointing score of 618.4, which could get him only the 14th place out of 52 starters.

Joydeep Karmakar, who had stood fourth in the London Olympic Games, shot much better and ended up 10th with 621.2 while the third Indian in fray – Hariom Singh – proved out of depth and gained the 29th slot with 613.2.

Their combined score of 1852.8 helped India finish just outside the medal reckoning at no. 4 behind gold medallists China (1876.6, a new world and games record), silver winners Korea (1869.0) and bronze medallists Kazakhstan (1859.0). PTI SSR AH
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