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Amidst India's shooting medal-mania and gold-glut at the Dr Karni Singh range, there was the one that slipped away. Shreyasi Singh, starting her trap final in third position, could have catapulted women's shotgun into the medal orbit but a cluster of knotted nerves played havoc with her performance as the young shooter ended 6th on Saturday.
On a day when Gagan Narang marched ahead to his fourth gold medal India's dozenth and Harpreet Singh and Vijay Kumar picked another in the men's 25-metre centre-fire pistol, Shreyasi's was the most heart-breaking miss, as her precision fell apart when gunning for the final 25 birds.
The Indian wasn't the only one spun in a bundle of nerves as eventual winner Anita North, forever looking the other way since she shoots left-handed shrieked into tears of relief at the end of competition, adding 22 to her qualification score of 71 to tally 93. Shreyasi, sipping water nervously after resuming from her commendable morning session when she shot 70, was clearly burdened by the ocassion and missed intermittently, even as the starchy crowd clucked their tongues in disappointment at every bird that did not end up in pink powder against the stunning setting of the Tughlakabad fort.
"The finals depend on luck, and it wasn't my day. I wouldn't blame the winds or conditions. But I was very nervous," Shreyasi added, after botching her fifth-place shootout as well, to Kiwi Natalie Rooney, in the same resigned vein as she fired her final three shots to pick 15 off 25. Kiwi Nadine Stanton's quirky war-cry announcement before she fired her shots couldn't propel her further than fourth, even as Shreyasi finished with 85 8 adrift of the gold winner.
Earlier, Gagan Narang shot a confident 1262.2 in the 50 m air-rifle 3-Position, helping himself to a Games record and inching closer to his stated target of six gold medals even as young Englishman James Huckle a Commonwealth Youth Games medallist kept the other Indian Imran Khan at bay, denying India a bronze, himself winning a fourth medal. Navyman Harpreet Singh, shooting 573 and Vijay Kumar coming up with another sterling 586 clinched the pair's event with the former saying that training with Omkar Singh had helped sharpen his skills level.
Suma Shirur and Kavita Yadav teamed up in 10 m air-rifle and had to stay content with bronze.
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