Aishwarya Singh Tomar bags India's 13th Olympic quota in shooting

It was the 13th Olympic quota for Indian shooters for Tokyo 2020 and the fourth of the championship after Deepak Kumar, Chinki Yadav and Tejaswini Sawant.

Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar after winning the men's 50-metre rifle 3-position Olympic quota with the bronze medal in the Asian Shooting Championships.

Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar bagged India’s 13th Olympic quota in shooting with a bronze medal in men’s 50m rifle 3 positions at the 14th Asian Championship on Sunday, giving the country its best-ever quota haul.

Tomar shot 449.1 in the eight-man finals to finish third on the podium behind gold medallist Kim Jonghyun (459.9) of Korea and Chinese Zhonghao Zhao (459.1) at the Lusail Shooting Complex.

The 18-year-old had sailed through to the finals with 1168 in qualifying.

The other Indians in the fray, Chain Singh finished 17th in the qualifications while Parul Kumar was 20th.

India had 11 shooters at the 2012 London Olympics and 12 in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

In July, the teenager from Khargone in Madhya Pradesh had shot down the men’s rifle 3 positions junior world record on his way to winning gold, helping the country top the medals tally in the ISSF Junior World Cup in Suhl, Germany.

Tomar is the second Indian, after veteran Sanjeev Rajput, to have achieved the quota place in the 3P event. He is a part of the junior team trained by Suma Shirur.

Competitive final

It was a top-quality final field with a Chinese world number three and a Korean world number nine besides an experienced Yuri Yurkov of Kazakhstan and the in-form Mahyar Sedaghat of Iran.

There were two Chinese in the finals but they could not claim quotas as China had exhausted its maximum two in the event and Korea’s Jonghyun had also sealed his quota at the Munich World Cup earlier in the year. That left the shooters from Iran, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Thailand besides Tomar, fighting for the three available Tokyo berths.

Enjoying a good run of form, Tomar had 151.7 after the first 15 kneeling position shots, 156.3 after the same number of shots in the prone position, before finishing with 449.1 to claim the bronze medal.

The Iranian and Kazakh claimed the other two quotas, finishing fifth and sixth respectively.

Tomar also won the team bronze in the event, combining with Chain Singh (1155) and Parul Kumar (1154). Individually, Singh finished 17th in the qualifications, while Parul Kumar was 20th.