In a World Championship field that had seven of the eight shooters who were a part of the Tokyo Olympic Games final, India’s Rudrankksh Balasaheb Patil topped qualification and dropped a score of 633.9-57x. This is his first ever World Championship appearance.
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Joining Patil in the eight-man final will be India’s Kiran Ankush Jadhav who came sixth in qualification with a score of 630.6. India’s third shooter in the competition, Arjun Babuta, didn’t have a good day at the Egypt International Olympic City, finishing with a score of 625.3 and was placed 48th among 114 shooters.
Both Patil and Jadhav will now be part of the Cairo Worlds final line-up and a top 4 position for either can guarantee India’s first pistol/rifle quota for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. They are joined in the finals by Chinese shooters Lihao Sheng and Haoran Yang – both silver and bronze medallists from the Tokyo Games respectively.
One of the leading concerns going into these World Championships for India was the lack of experience that its shooters had. But at the biggest event that the sport has to offer, Patil started on the best of notes and any dip in numbers that one can expect in competitions of this high level simply never appeared. In the 60-shot qualification process, Patil started his first series of 10 with a score of 105.8 and then followed it up in the next series two series’ with mammoth scores of 106.1 and 106.4. In his next two series he shot 105.1, 105.2.
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The Cairo Worlds saw some high-level shooting on the day with the eight-position shooter scoring 630.0 to qualify. In an extremely competitive field where scores were sky high, Patil’s scores never seemed to dip. He didn’t have a single shot below 10.1 in the 60-shot qualification event and remarkably only had five shots under 10.3.
Patil’s compatriot Kiran Ankush Jadhav had earlier scored 630.6 in the first relay of the qualification and may have had a marginally higher score if not for his final shot which ended up being a 9.7. His 60-shot chart read: 105.6, 103.5, 105.4, 105.0, 105.9 and 105.2.
The 27-year-old Maharashtra athlete is also a first-time World Championship appearing shooter and is currently employed with the Indian Navy. Jadhav was part of a group of six shooters in the first relay – all of whom had scored 630.0 or more. He will now take part in the finals where a top-4 finish can lend a Paris Olympics quota.
