Air Shooting Match 18th Asian Games Jakarta Palembang 2018

18th  Asian Games Jakarta

Palembang 2018

India Win Gold In Air Shooting

In

Asian Games 2018

Antara/Palembang/ Jakarta

Sixteen-year-old Saurabh Chaudhary claimed the gold medal in the men’s 10-meter air pistol at the 2018 Asian Games on Tuesday morning at the Jakabaring Shooting Range after Olympic champion Hoang Xuan Vinh missed out on a place in the final.

Chaudhary put on a nerveless performance to take the title with a new Asian Games record score of 240.7, finishing ahead of former world champion Tomoyuki Matsuda of Japan, with India’s Abishek Verma claiming the bronze medal.

Matsuda led for much of the competition, but the 2010 world champion’s wayward shot in the penultimate round allowed Chaudhary to take the lead for the first time and the India shooter secured the gold medal with his final attempt.

“I’m very happy,” said Chaudhary. “I didn’t think I’d win the final but I was determined to do what I could and just focus on my technique.”

“Before the last shot I wasn’t thinking about winning the gold, but I knew I had the silver. That’s all I was thinking about. I knew I was number one after the last shot, but I had no idea what was going to happen before that because it was so close.

“I wasn’t thinking about the fact I was facing a world champion or an Olympic champion. I was just focusing on my own technique.”

Chaudhary’s gold medal-winning performance comes in his first appearance at a major Games and a year after he finished in fourth place at the Junior World Championships in Suhl, Germany.

Earlier in the day, Vietnam’s Hoang, who won his country’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in Rio de Janeiro two years ago, just missed out on a place in the final after finishing ninth in the qualifying round. 

His score of 579 saw him tied with Korea Republic’s Lee Dae-myung and Kazakhstan's Vladimir Issachenko, but Hoang’s elimination was due to his lower number of inner 10 shots, which serves as a tie-breaker.

That left Chaudhary to claim India’s first shooting gold medal of the 18th Asian Games and the teenager will next travel to Korea Republic at the end of the month, where he will compete in the Junior World Championships..