Changwon (South Korea): Gurpreet Singh clinched a silver in the senior men’s standard pistol but India’s junior shooters continued to hold centre-stage, snaring two gold medals to steer the country to their best-ever finish in the ISSF World Championships here, Friday.
Vijayveer Sidhu, 16, shot a gold in the 25m standard pistol event for junior men after combining with Rajkanwar Singh Sandhu and Adarsh Singh to claim the team gold on the last day of the prestigious competition.
India signed off third in the overall medals tally with 11 gold, nine silver and seven bronze medals for a total of 27, making this their best performance in the showpiece.
Sidhu, who finished fourth in the 25m pistol Thursday, managed an individual score of 572 points to finish ahead of Korean Lee Gunheyok (570) and China’s Haojie Zhu (565).
In team competition, Sidhu, Sandhu (564) and Adarsh (559) totalled 1,695 to fetch the top honours with Korea (1,693) and Czech Republic (1,674) settling for the silver and the bronze medals respectively.
In the senior competition, Gurpreet ensured that the contingent signed off on a positive note with his silver. He fired a score of 579 to finish second behind Ukraine’s Pavlo Korostylov, who shot 581. The bronze medal went to Korea’s Kim Junhong, who shot the same score as the Indian but had lesser inner-10s to his credit.
India however, missed out on a team medal as Gurpreet, Amanpreet Singh (560) and Vijay Kumar (560) combined for a score of 1,699 to finish fourth.
India’s junior women’s skeet team finished a creditable fourth with the trio of Simranpreet Kaur, Parinaaz Dhaliwal and Areeba Khan totalling 318. None of them managed to qualify for the individual finals. In the men’s skeet event, Angad Vir Singh Bajwa shot 118 to finish 49th, followed by Sheeraz Sheikh (115) at 69th. Mairaj Ahmad Khan shot 113 to finish 77th. The team finished 20th.
In the men’s 300m rifle 3 positions Parul Kumar (1,134) was the best-placed Indian at 24th, while Amit Kumar shot 1,124 to finish 28th. Akash Ravidas (1,007) was further down at 35th. In the team event, India finished eighth with 3,335 points.