Punjab’s Anjum Moudgil and Arjun Babuta bagged the 10m air rifle mixed team title at the 61st National Shooting Championship being held at Thiruvananthapuram.
This was third gold for Anjum, after she won the Women’s 50m Rifle Prone individual and team gold medals on the opening day of the championship.
The event, which was conducted for the first time in the championships and is to be introduced as a medal discipline in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, witnessed 20 teams battling it out in the preliminaries from which five were selected for the final shoot out.
The Punjab pair shot a total of 497.9 in the 50-shot final, getting the better of Apurvi Chandela and Yash Vardhan of Rajasthan, who ended with 496.4.
Pooja Ghatkar and Shahu Mane of Maharashtra won the bronze medal with a score of 433.9. This was Anjum’s third gold of the tournament.
Anjum and Arjun qualified fifth out of five pairs that made it to the final from the total 24 teams that participated. Each team had to shoot 80 shots, 40 by each shooter, post which the final five pairs were identified.
Anjum (416.8) and Arjun (415.3) shot a total score of 832.1. Meghana Sajjanar and Tejas Krishna Prasad of Karnataka topped the charts with 835.1, thanks largely to a superlative 420.8 by Meghana. Akhil Sheoran and Ayushi Gupta were the other team who made it to the finals.
In the finals, however, Anjum and Arjun were never seriously challenged and led from start to finish to easily quell the challenge of the Rajasthan and Maharashtra pair.
Maharashtra, however, managed to win the junior air rifle mixed team gold through the pair of Prachi Gadkari and Shahu Mane, who shot a score of 493.9 in the final. Elavenil Valarivan and Gohil Harshrajsinhji of Gujarat shot 490.6 to settle for silver. The bronze went to Vanishka Rathore and Divyansh Panwar of Rajasthan with 429.4.
Shahu Mane picked up another gold medal in partnership with Nupur Patil helping Maharashtra to claim gold in the youth category with a score of 499.6 points. Himachal Pradesh duo of Zeena Khitta and Surya Pratap Singh won the silver with 496.7 while Mehuli Ghosh and Archisman Chakraborty of West Bengal won the bronze with 430.9.
