BHOPAL, Dec 12:
Karnataka’s Divya TS secured her maiden women’s 10m air pistol national title, getting the better of Uttar Pradesh’s Sanskriti Bana in a close gold medal match at the 65th National Shooting Championship, which concluded here on Monday.
Divya beat Sanskriti 16-14 in the gold medal match and Haryana’s Rhythm Sangwan claimed the bronze.
Olympian Manu Bhaker won the junior women’s air pistol gold with a similarly tight 17-13 victory over Telangana’s Esha Singh.
Rhythm was yet again in bronze position, although she did win the gold in the Youth category, with a 16-12 win over Sanskriti.
In the women’s air pistol qualification, Manu topped the field with a score of 583, Esha was fifth with a score of 576, Divya was ranked third with 578 and Sanskriti fourth with 577. Rhythm was sixth with 575.
Divya then topped the ranking round with a score of 254.2, while Sanskriti was second with 251.6.
In the juniors, Manu topped the top eights with a score of 252.4, 0.5 ahead of second placed Esha. Rhythm finished with 248.
National Rifle Association of India (NRA) secretary Rajiv Bhatia said that this year’s nationals in shotgun were “unique”, where for the first time three categories were created to manage the high number of competing shooters.
“We had more than 800 entries in shotgun this time around, and to streamline the process after learning a lesson from the previous edition, we made these changes. Clubbing all the shotgun shooters at the previous nationals had created a messy situation and me managed to avoid that in Bhopal,” said Bhatia.
“We divided the shotgun events into three groups — Group A for pre-national/GV Mavlankar qualified shooter, Group 2 for shooters whose previous nationals scores were between 75-99 out of 125, and Group C for shooters who had scores of 100 and above.” (PTI)
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