The Indian shooters asserted their undisputed class as they swept the gold medals in both the mixed air rifle and mixed air pistol competitions in the shooting World Cup in Beijing on Thursday.
Even though there was no Olympic quota place on offer, as the mixed events had Olympic quotas only in the last World Championship in Korea, it was an incredible performance by the Indian teams, especially in the light of a completely new format that was adopted to make the event more lively.
Anjum Moudgil and Divyansh Singh Panwar beat the Chinese to win the mixed air rifle gold and set the tempo for the day.
Quite interestingly, Anjum and Divyansh had qualified in the sixth place, which in the old format may not have fetched them a berth in the medal phase.
Read: 'Each shot is a decider when you don't have an Olympic quota'
In the new format, the top eight teams qualify for the quarterfinals, followed by the semifinals and the gold and bronze medal matches thereafter.
Interestingly, both the Indian rifle teams qualified for the knock-out phase, a commendable effort in a strong field of 62 teams, but the team of Apurvi Chandela and Deepak Kumar eventually finished sixth.
In the mixed air pistol competition, Manu Bhaker and Saurabh Chaudhary who had won the World Cup gold in Delhi and the Asian Air Gun gold thereafter, were the favourites and proved so.
Manu and Saurabh beat the Chinese team of Jiang Ranxin and Pang Wie 16-6 in the gold medal match. The two teams had tied in the semifinals with 290 each, even though the Indian pair had a better accuracy of 15x to 10x.
In the quarterfinals, the Indian pair had scored the second best score of 289, and had earlier qualified for the knock-out in the fifth place with 482 out of 500.
"I like the new format. The ISSF has been practising this in the junior competitions in Suhl for many years. It is an exciting format even at the quarterfinal stage as outcome depends on which two teams are fighting together," revealed Olympian and rifle coach Deepali Deshpande.
The coach explained that Anjum and Divyansh had tough draw of having to negotiate the Romanian team in the quarterfinals and the Russians in the semis.
In the final, after each shot, the better scoring team gets two points. Whichever team reaches 16 first wins it. In case of a tie, as was the case with Anjum and Divyansh against the Chinese team, at 15-15, the Indian pair prevailed with the last shot, for a thrilling 17-15 triumph.
It may be noted that with only two women shooters in air rifle (Anjum and Apurvi), and one in men’s air pistol (Saurabh) having won Olympic quota, India has to acquire the individual Olympic quotas in the
World Cups and the Asian Championship to be able to form mixed pairs at the Tokyo Olympics next year.
The results:
Mixed air pistol: 1. India (Manu Bhaker, Saurabh Chaudhary) 16 (290, 289, 482); 2. China-A (Jiang Ranxin, Pang Wie) 6 (290, 291, 481); 3. Russsia (Vitalina Batsarashkina, Artem Chernousov) 16 (288, 2888, 488); 4. China (Qian Wei, Wang Meng Yi) 4 (287, 289, 482); 12. India-A (Heena Sidhu, Shahzar Rizvi) 479.
Mixed air rifle: 1. India-A (Anjum moudgil, Divyansh Singh Panwar) 17 (311.8, 313.4, 522.7); 2. China-A (Liu Ruxuan, Yang Haoran) 15 (315.5, 312.2, 524.1); 3. Russia-A (Yulia Karimova, Grigorii Shamakov) 16 (310.9, 315.1, 523.8); 4. US (Alison Marie Weisz, Timothy Sherry) 2 (310.1, 310.1, 522.9); India (Apurvi Chandela, Deepak Kumar) 309.9 (522.8).
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