Lima: Paris Olympics shooters Shriyanka Sadangi and Anish Bhanwala finished eighth in the women’s 50m rifle 3-positions final and 25m rapid-fire event respectively on the third day of the ISSF World Cup Rifle/Pistol/Shotgun stage here.
Shriyanka became the latest Indian shooter on this double-legged South American sojourn to make the cut for a maiden individual World Cup final, but exited after the 10th shot of the standing position round, the 40th of the 45-shot final.
Sagen Maddalena of the USA, the silver medallist in the Paris Games, won the gold. Sagen’s effort took the USA to the top of the medal tally with three gold and six medals overall.
India was second at the end of the competition on Thursday, with two gold medals, a silver and a bronze each.
In the 25m rapid-fire event, Anish missed a bronze medal by a couple of points. He shot a total of 575 over two days as local hope Kevin Altamarino Farfan took the sixth and final qualifying spot with a tally of 577.
Two other Indian Olympians in the event, Gurpreet Singh (572) and Vijayveer Sidhu (569), finished 11th and 14th respectively.
Indian shooters had a challenging day overall with none of them making the men’s 3P final.
In the women’s 3P, the Indians struggled after the first two kneeling and prone positions. But all three — Shriyanka, Ashi Chouksey and previous World Cup gold winner Sift Kaur Samra — picked up the pace admirably in the final standing position to make a dash for the qualifying mark.
Shriyanka succeeded in taking seventh place with a solid 588, while Ashi finished stronger on accuracy than Sift, taking the ninth spot to the latter’s 11th with both stopping at 587 and thereby missing out narrowly.
In the final, the Indian began well with a 10.5 as her first effort, but as the grind to the finish began, Shriyanka petered out. Her best chance was when she had moved up to sixth with two more shots of the second prone position remaining but returns of 9.8 and 9.3 effectively doused her challenge.
She closed with a 9.9 to wrap with 400.7, bowing out alongside seventh placed Brazilian Geovana Meyer.
Another Indian, Manini Kaushik, who was competing for Ranking Points Only (RPO), shot a superb 589 to finish third after the qualification round in the event. But, since Manini was competing in the RPO category, she could not advance to the final.
She had the best qualification round score among all the Indians in women’s 50m rifle 3-positions event.
Aishwary, Chain unimpressive
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In the men’s 3P, Aishwary Tomar, Niraj Kumar and Chain Singh finished at 17th, 18th and 19th respectively. The first two shooters shot identical scores of 587 to miss the last qualifying mark by a couple of points, while Chain shot 586.
