Day six of the Asia Olympic Shooting qualifiers being held at the Dr. Karni Singh Shooting Range in New Delhi saw Malaysia and Saudi Arabia bag their first quotas in shooting for the upcoming Rio Olympics while the third available quota of the day was won by Japan who also won their fifth Gold medal of the competition.
It was another day of near misses for India though, where three shooters, navy man Omkar Singh in the Men’s 10M Air Pistol and Arti Singh Rao and Sania Sheikh in Women’s Skeet made it to their respective finals but failed to win a quota or a medal for the country.
The best performance of the day for India came in the Women’s Skeet where youngster Sania Sheikh finished fourth losing out to Korea’s Kim Minji 14-11 in the Bronze medal match. “I am very disheartened because we were going for the Gold and both Arti and myself have been shooting 14 regularly in training”, said Sania after the event, referring to the score of 10 both Arti and herself shot in the semi-final round. She eventually won a shoot-off which also had Arti in it, to qualify for the Bronze medal match where Kim outgunned her.
The Gold and the only available Rio quota in the event was won by Japan’s Naoko Ishihara who defeated Thailand’s Nutchaya Sutarporn 13-9 in the Gold medal match.
In the Men’s 10M Air Pistol finals, Omkar qualified in 5th place with a score of 577. Three of the eight shooters in the final could not claim quotas as either their country had exhausted their maximum limit of two quotas per event per country or the athletes themselves had won Olympic quotas for their countries in earlier competitions.
Omkar started off well with a score of 10.3 in the 20 shot final, but flattered to deceive after being in quota contention for a while, but a disappointing 7.9 in the 8th shot meant that he got eliminated in 7th position after the 10th shot. The two available quotas in the event went to the Gold medalist from Malaysia Guanjie Wong and Silver medalist from Saudi Arabia Atallah Alanazi. Kim Jong Su of North Korea won the Bronze in the event.
There are seven quota places still up for grabs on the concluding day of the competition tomorrow which will see the finals of the Men’s Skeet and Men’s 50M Rifle 3 Positions event. Sanjeev Rajput in Rifle and Man Singh in Skeet will lead the Indian hopes for Olympic quota places.
