An impish smile firmly in place, a beaming Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar was nothing like what he had seemed a few minutes before – a picture of concentration, blocking out everything in the world except himself, his rifle and the target 10m away. Having won bronze in his maiden Asian Games outing, the 22-year-old with two medals on a day was clearly enjoying the spotlight.
That spotlight had been firmly on the men and women with the guns to kick-start India’s medal run at the Asian Games. While the women duly opened the medal tally with a silver in the 10m air rifle team, the men went a step further, not just getting India’s maiden gold in this edition of the Games but doing it in style, with a new World Record to boot. That the record they broke had been held by host China made it sweeter.
In the individual qualification round, the trio shot a total of 1893.7, 0.4 points more than the previous world record score set by China last month in the Baku World Championship.
