India mine medals at shotgun Worlds

New Delhi: Ankur Mittal added a World Championship silver to his kitty of medals for the year, losing narrowly to Russia’s Vitaly Fokeev in the final of the double trap event at the ISSF world championship shotgun in Moscow on Tuesday. In the junior class, Alvar Rizvi landed a silver and India took the team gold.

Mittal became only the fourth individual Indian shotgun shooter at the senior level to win a medal at the world championships after Dr. Karni Singh, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore and Manavjit Singh Sandhu. After topping qualifying with 145 hits from 150 shots, and through the 80-shot final, Mittal narrowly lost out to the Russian who was also the 2006 world champion. Fokeev took the crown with 68 to Ankur’s 66. Hu Binyuan of China took bronze with 50.

In the junior men’s event, Shardul Vihan and Ahvar Rizvi topped qualifying to get into the top six. Shardul shot 139 to be the sole leader of the pack. Ahvar shot 138 and then topped a three-way shoot-off to determine positions, to qualify for the finals in second place.  In the shoot-off, Rizvi shot 10 targets in a row to beat Australian Mitchell Iles-Crevatin (9) and Ying Qi (3) of China to the third and fourth qualifying spots. 

Their efforts along with that of Shapath Bhradwaj’s effort of 124 meant that India won team gold in the event with a combined score of 401. Italy won silver with 389 and China bronze with 387. In the individual final, Ahvar shot well to lead right till the end, but lost out on the last two targets to Britain’s James Dedman. Ahvar finished with 66 out of 80 targets with Dedman a point ahead on 67.