A disappointing 8.7 on his seventh attempt and 8.9 on his 15th attempt was the real gap between Gurpreet Singh winning a silver medal and a gold medal at the 8th Asian Air Gun Championship at Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range on Tuesday.
While Gurpreet staged a fantastic comeback to win a silver medal in the 10m Air Pistol category, his Army teammate and strong Olympic gold hopeful Jitu Rai won silver.
Iran’s Sepehr Safari Boroujeni walked away with the gold medal finishing with a total score of 198.7 which was 1.1 points better than Gurpreet (197.6). Jitu was eliminated after the 18th shot to finish with a final score of 177.6.
later, Jitu stated that he’s happy with his scores this year even though he’s not performing as exceptionally as he did in the year before. He further acknowledged that the pressure of expectations is getting to him.
The third Indian in the fray, Omkar Singh, was the first to be eliminated thus finishing eighth.
Jitu stayed in the lead for the first eight shots with a score of 80.3 thus building a narrow lead over Safari (79.7). However he couldn’t sustain it and the Iranian never let go of his lead.
At one stage, Gurpreet looked to be on the way out but he picked up the pace from the sixth shot. “At one stage I was seeing myself out of the competition. But as we went on, I couldn’t notice my name at the bottom but it started to rise. From there, the idea was to maintain that place,” he said.