Gold rush continues for juniors, Gurpreet adds senior silver

Changwon (South Korea): Gurpreet Singh clinched a silver in the senior men's standard pistol but India's junior shooters continued to hold centre-stage, snaring two gold medals to steer the country to its best-ever finish in the ISSF World Championships here Friday.

Vijayveer Sidhu, 16, shot a gold in the 25m standard pistol event for junior men after combining with Rajkanwar Singh Sandhu and Adarsh Singh to claim the team gold on the last day of the prestigious International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) competition.

India signed off third in the overall medals tally with 11 gold, nine silver and seven bronze medals for a total of 27, making this their best performance in the showpiece.

Sidhu, who finished fourth in the 25m pistol Thursday, managed an individual score of 572 to finish ahead of Korean Lee Gunheyok (570) and China's Haojie Zhu 565).

In the team competition, Sidhu, Sandhu (564) and Singh (559) totalled 1695 to fetch the top honours with Korea (1693) and Czech Republic (1674) settling for the silver and the bronze medals respectively.

Singh managed a fourth-place finish in the individual competition.

In the senior competition, Gurpreet Singh ensured that the contingent signed off on a positive note with his silver.

The former Commonwealth Games gold-medallist fired a score of 579 to finish second behind Ukraine's Pavlo Korostylov, who shot a score of 581. The bronze medal went to Koreas Kim Junhong, who shot the same score as the Indian but had lesser inner-10s to his credit.