National Shooting Championship: Vijayveer has last laugh in battle of Olympians against Gurpreet
National Shooting Championship: Vijayveer has last laugh in battle of Olympians against Gurpreet
Vijayveer Sidhu beat Gurpreet Singh 28-25 in an entertaining climax in rapid-fire pistol in the 67th National Shooting Championship at the Dr. Karni Singh Range, Tughlakabad, on Thursday.
The 22-year-old Vijayveer, who finished ninth at the Paris Olympics, shot a consistently strong final as he took a four-point lead before the last five shots.
Quite uncharacteristically, Vijayveer recorded only one shot in the 4-second series of five shots in the end, but Olympian Gurpreet who had endured a string of shoot-off to climb up in the six-man final, could not execute a fairy-tale finish.
In fact, Gurpreet was constantly caught with overtime shots and ended with one in the last series as well. He had four such shots through the final which cost him four points in the match.
“I was taking a lot of risk with my shots in trying to be aggressive,” said Gurpreet, as he announced that it was his last Nationals and that he would focus on coaching henceforth.
Shivam Shukla rose to the bronze medal ahead of Ankur Goel who was not at his best in the final after a good start.
Udhayveer Sidhu and Suraj Sharma were the others to make the final.
Olympian Anish Bhanwala was off-colour and placed 22nd with a total of 568. Another leading shooter Adarsh Singh could only muster 565 for the 28th place in a strong field of 123 shooters.
Suraj did well to clinch the junior silver behind Raajwardan Paatil, a trainee of Gun for Glory in Pune, who struck perfect-5 thrice in a row to outclass the field. Eventually, Raajwardan won 31-23, while Abhinav Choudhary took the bronze, ahead of Jatin, Bhavya Sharma and Mukesh Nelavalli.
