Stunning shots: Mehuli's golden feat after disastrous 3.4 start

After beginning the qualifying round with a 3.4, Mehuli Ghosh showed tremendous grit to make the finals and collect a gold medal.

Mehuli Ghosh with the gold medal she won at the Intershoot International Shooting Championship at the Hague, Netherlands.

Former Jamaican-Canadian sprinter and Olympic gold medalist Donovan Bailey had once famously said, “Every kid needs a mentor. Everybody needs a mentor.”

Mehuli Ghosh, in an earlier interview with Sportstar , had said she started treading on the right path when she decided to join Joydeep Karmakar’s Shooting Academy in 2015.

The decision to become a part of JKSA has been paying dividends for the young Mehuli and she has been on the rise ever since. Friday bore testimony to that surge when at the Hague, Netherlands, Mehuli’s performance at the Intershoot International Shooting Championship handed her the gold medal. That seemed unlikely at the beginning when Mehuli shot way off the target for a score of 3.4.

READ: Mehuli Ghosh, Jitu Rai clinch gold at Hague InterShoot

Karmakar, a champion shooter himself, who had missed the 2012 Olympic bronze in the 50m rifle prone event by a whisker, couldn’t be prouder of her show at the InterShoot. He later tweeted about it and couldn’t stop gushing, in a chat with  Sportstar , “It was due to a malfunctioning of the rifle which caused a sudden release of air. It went out of control to hit 3.4.

Never say die! 18 yr, @GhoshMehuli shoots a 3.4 and still manages to clinch the Gold in a star studded Senior final of @InterShootNL#Nederlands Day II. Thus bagging on both days.@Media_SAI@OGQ_India@Mallcom_India@ASOS_Aditya@JKSAindia@IndinNederlands@LaureusSportpic.twitter.com/8D6dNwrDkb

— Joydeep Karmakar OLY (@Joydeep709) February 2, 2019

 

“In shooting terms, that is almost ‘Game Over’, because at that level anybody hardly shoots even a 9. She staged a brilliant comeback later to make the finals. It was a miracle! This is unheard of and shows the tremendous grit she has got.

“It is like if you are running in a 200m race and then you fall down, but you come up and win it. I had a chat with her and it was all about her positivity, the attitude she possesses of not looking back,” said Karmakar, who is monitoring the CWG silver medalist’s progress as the high-performance coach for the Olympic Gold Quest programme.

I saw it coming as a blow and almost knocked me down. But chose not to think about it, but bounce back with even more https://t.co/ae6bNjswyx's match was nothing less than a boxing bout for me! At the end I won the 2nd. https://t.co/cf6QGo32KJ

— Mehuli Ghosh (@GhoshMehuli) February 1, 2019

 

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On the opening day of the competition, Mehuli finished with a score of 633.0 (her personal best) in qualification in women’s air rifle. The score was 0.4 short of the world record set by Zhu Yingjie of China in the World Cup in Fort Benning last year.

Mehuli followed that up with a golden finish in the final with a total of 250.8.