New Delhi: Madhya Pradesh’s Anil Kumar put in a strong performance to clinch the gold in 10m Air Rifle on the second day of the 18th KSS Memorial Shooting Championship at the Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range in Delhi.
However, Gagan Narang, who earlier topped the charts in qualification round, missed out on a medal after failing to start strong in the final.
Anil scored 246.7 to finish on top while Air Force’s Manoj Dalal scored 245.2 to take silver and his teammate Deepak Kumar finished with bronze with a score of 224.6.
Of the three shooters from the Air Force in the final, Dalal led after the first two series with a score of 102.6. However he failed to maintain his head after a string of poor scores and Anil inched ahead by a decimal point after the 14th shot. After 16 shots, Anil widened his lead with a score of 164.3 and maintained his grip on gold.
Deepak Kumar missed a 10 that would have given him a chance of a higher position on the table.
London 2012 Olympic medallist Narang started on a string of below-10 scores which put him on the bottom of the table early and he couldn’t recover from that, becoming the second shooter to be eliminated.
Rajasthan’s Yash Vardhan was the first to go out, even as he shot a perfect score of 10.9 on his penultimate chance.
In the 10m Air Rifle youth, Aishwarya Tomar of Madhya Pradesh had thought he did enough to clinch the gold as he scored 249.9, but Shahu Mane of Maharashtra had other plans as he shot to gold with a narrow difference of .2 on the cumulative score line (251.1). Rajasthan’s Yashwardhan clinched the bronze as he scored 229.9 in his second final.
Mane had also qualified for the senior men’s final bit did not shoot.
However, Yashwardhan didn’t lose focus when it came to the 10m air rifle junior category and sealed the gold medal in his third final of the day. Mane got the silver while another his Maharashtra teammate Lagad Gorak, who also shot in the men’s final, got the bronze medal.
In the para-shooting section, last year’s defending champion of the 10m air rifle (IPC) Standing Championship (Para), Swaroop Unhalkar of Maharashtra, comprehensively defended his title with a score of 608.5, while 14-year-old Ankur Das shot a superb score of 631.4 in Para SH2 Prone.