RIO DE JANEIRO: It was a tale of missed opportunities for India at the Olympic Games here as star marksman Abhinav Bindra narrowly missed a medal and the men’s hockey team slumped to a 1-2 defeat to Germany by conceding a goal with three seconds left in the match on the third day of competitions.
There were setbacks in other events too as the trap shooting duo of Manavjit Singh Sandhu and Kynan Chenai could not improve on their opening day performance and failed to qualify for the Olympics men’s trap semifinals, signing off at 16th and 19th respectively on the second and final day of qualification.
Woman archer Laxmirani Majhi also put up a below-par performance in the individual elimination round one and bowed out without a fight against Alexandra Longova of Slovakia. Majhi just could not raise her level of marksmanship and lost the contest 1-7, losing three sets and drawing another. Bindra the only individual Olympic gold medalist in 2008 at Beijing in the same men’s 10m air rifle event, lost a tension-filled shoot-off against Ukrainian marksman S Kulish after the two were tied third at 163.8 in the race to reach the medal round. In the shoot-off, the Indian scored 10 points to 10.5 of the Ukrainian. Bindra did not show any emotion after the heart-breaking moment as he walked off after losing the one-shot elimination against Kulish who went on to win the silver medal with 204.6 behind gold medalist Niccolo Campriani (206.1) of Italy. In fact, the Indian ace, in his fifth and last appearance in Olympics, was at one stage standing second in the eight-man final in which one shooter gets eliminated gradually leading to the final two men standing in the face-off for the gold after the 20th shot. The Zirakpur-based shooter had finished seventh in the qualifying round to make the cut for the finals while his compatriot and London Olympics bronze medallist Gagan Narang was way off the mark and missed out of the finals after finishing at a lowly 23rd position. Bindra scored 625.7 to book a berth in the finals. This is the only event Bindra is competing in the ongoing Games.—PTI
