London, 04 August 2012: Army sharp shooter Vijay Kumar
on Friday fought a nerve-wracking battle with five other top marksmen
to clinch the silver medal in the men’s 25m Rapid Fire Pistol event at
the Olympic Games. Kumar beat back the challenge of world champion
Alexei Klimov of Russia, Chinese duo of Ding Feng and Zhang Jian and
German Christian Reitz in the 40-shot final to finish runner-up in a
thrilling finale behind Cuba’s Leuris Pupo who shot his way to the gold
with a world record equalling score of 34.
The 26-year-old army subedar from Himachal Pradesh found the target 30
times out of 40 attempts in the series comprising eight rounds of five
shots each. This is India’s second medal in the ongoing quadrennial
extravaganza after fellow marksman Gagan Narang’s bronze in the 10m Air
Rifle event on July 30. This was also the country’s fourth medal in
shooting in Olympic history.
The other medal winners are Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (silver in 2004
Athens) , Abhinav Bindra (gold in 2008 Beijing) besides Narang. Kumar
started with a bang, hitting the target all five times and kept himself
in the hunt for a medal by consistently finding the target.
After a perfect five out of five at the start, Kumar, a double gold
medallist in the 2010 Commonwealth Games, found the target four times in
the second and third series, but missed it twice in the fourth.
He came back strongly by finding the target four times in the next
three rounds and assured himself of a silver. In the last round after
Pupo shot four to clinch the gold, Kumar seemed to relax a bit and
missed three targets. The bronze medal was won by Feng with a tally of
27.
In the final, Kumar was assured of a medal after the the elimination of
the trio of Klimov (23), Jian (17) and Christian (13) leaving himself,
Pupo and Feng in the fray. The silver was in his bag when Feng missed
twice in the seventh round and Kumar replied with four.
Kumar had earlier lifted the Indian shooting team’s spirit after the
flop show by Narang, who failed to qualify for the final of the 50m
Rifle Prone, by entering the finals of his event through the
preliminaries. En route to his total score of 585, Kumar became the
second shooter to break the previous Olympic record of 583 to give a
hint of his potential during the second stage of qualification.
Placed fourth in the list, Kumar, who had scored 293 in stage 1 of the
qualification on Thursday, shot a series of 98 97 97 in the second stage
to take his total score to 585. He shot a sequence of 99 96 98 at the
Royal Artillery Barracks. The Army man then successfully competed with
five shooters for a medal.
Pre-Games medal favourite Ronjan Sodhi had yesterday failed to qualify
for the double trap event. Klimov had created a new world record by
shooting 592 but he could not replicate that in the final. He scored a
total of 592 after Stage 2, breaking the existing world record of 591
and Olympic record of 583, with 294 points in Stage 1 and a staggering
298 out of 300 in Stage 2. - UT
