Olympian Sift Kaur Samra gave India a golden double at the Asian Shooting Championships on Tuesday, which was an amazing display of skill. The 23-year-old world record holder not only won the gold medal for herself in the women’s 50m rifle 3 positions, but she also led the Indian team to a big win in the same event.
Sift’s most recent win gives her four gold medals at the Asian Championships, which shows how consistently she does well at the international level. From the very beginning, she was in a class of her own. She won the qualification round with a score of 589, which put her in the final with eight other shooters.
Sift shot a great 459.2 in the final, just beating China’s Yang Yujie (458.8) by a small margin to take first place. The final was very close, with Sift in the lead the whole time during the knockout rounds. Even though her Chinese opponent put up a strong fight at the end, Sift stayed calm and won the gold by just 0.4 points. With a score of 448.2, Japan’s Nobata Misaki won the bronze.
The Indian team, which also took first place, joined Sift on the podium. The three of them—Sift, veteran Anjum Moudgil, and Ashi Chouksey—scored a total of 1753 points, beating Japan (1750) and South Korea (1745). Sift’s individual qualification score of 589, together with Ashi’s 586 and Anjum’s 578, helped the team do well.
India has done so well that they are now in second place on the medal tally with 20 medals, nine of which are gold. China is in the lead right now with 24 medals, 13 of which are gold.
Junior Shooters Also Do Well
The Indian team did well in more than just the senior division. Anushka Thokur, a youngster from India, had a great first international competition, winning gold in the junior women’s 50m rifle 3 positions event. She triumphed by five points over South Korea’s Oh Sehee, who won silver, with a great score of 460.7 in the final. Anushka, together with her teammates Prachi Gaikwad and Mahit Sandhu, also won the team gold for India. The three of them scored a total of 1758 points.
Sameer also won a bronze medal in the junior men’s 25m rapid-fire pistol event, and his team won gold in another junior event. The junior trap teams for both men and women also won gold medals. Haris Sabeera won an individual gold medal, and Arya Vansh Tyagi won an individual silver medal.