It was a mixed day for Indian shooters in the 2024 Paris Olympics as Arjun Babuta finished an agonising fourth in the men’s 10m air rifle final while the pairing of Manu Bhaker and Sarabjot Singh finished third in the 10m air pistol mixed team event qualification round on Monday.
Ramita Jindal was also in action in the women’s 10m air rifle final and finished seventh out of eight shooters, while Prithviraj Tondaiman is currently in 30th place after three rounds at the end of the first day of the men’s Trap qualification.
By finishing in third place, Bhaker and Singh will be up against women’s 10m air pistol gold medallist Oh Ye Jin and Lee Wonho of South Korea for the bronze medal on Tuesday. Bhaker has a chance to become the first athlete in Independent India to win two Olympic medals in a single edition.
She had finished with a bronze medal at the individual women’s 10m air pistol event on Sunday.
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Bhaker and Singh finished with a score of 580 while Oh and Lee were one point behind on 579. There was also a one point difference between the Indian pair and Serbia in second place.
Bhaker was solid in her first two series with scores of 98, but a 95 in the third series saw the team slip into the bronze medal match spots. Singh, who had failed to qualify for the individual final, shot 97 in the second and third series.
The other Indian team in the 10m air pistol mixed event, Rhythm Sangwan and Arjun Singh Cheema placed 10th with a score of 576.
Tondaiman shot 22, 25 and 21 in his first three rounds of the men’s trap qualification. The Indian has two more rounds to try and finish in the top six that move into the final when the qualification round resumes on Tuesday.
Heartbreak for Babuta
It was yet another fourth-place finish for an Indian in the men’s 10m air rifle final after Abhinav Bindra finished outside the podium spots back in Rio 2016.
The 25-year-old shooter began the final in top form, consistently shooting near the centre of the target to end the first series in third place with a score of 105. Two shots later, Babuta was in second place and just 0.1 points behind the eventual gold medallist and world record holder Sheng Lihao of China.
He continued to remain in second place for one more series, but then began to slip from the fifth series onwards.
With Victor Lindgren of Sweden and Miran Maricic of Croatia at his heels, Babuta was unable to open up a gap and ended with a 9.5 to ultimately finish fourth with a score of 208.4.
In the women’s 10m air rifle final, Jindal found herself in fourth place after the first five shots, but ended up slipping to seventh place after 10 shots with a score of 104.
The 2022 Asian Games medallist saved herself with a shot of 10.5 to move into sixth and eliminate Norway’s Hegg Jeanette Duestad. But in the next elimination, the Indian was tied with France’s Oceanne Muller with a score of 145.3 and went to a shoot-off where the local favourite shot 10.8 to Jindal’s 10.5 which saw the Indian be eliminated from the final.
