SHOOTING | Varun Tomar asserts his class in the air pistol event

Varun Tomar shines with double gold medals in air pistol at 67th National Shooting Championship, outperforming top competitors.

Varun Tomar twice stepped it up at the business end of the competition to bag the air pistol men’s and junior section gold medals in the 67th National shooting championship at the Dr. Karni Singh Range on Sunday.

While the focus was on former world No. 1 Saurabh Chaudhary, after he topped qualification with a national record 591, Varun — who had missed Olympic selection narrowly for Paris — shot brilliantly to emerge as the champion in back to back finals.

Saurabh was not in the best form in the final and placed fifth following shots of 8.5 and 9.7. In contrast, Varun found the big shots in time to beat fellow Army shooter Pradhyumn Singh by 0.8 point for the men’s gold. Aakash Bhardwaj from Rajasthan bagged the bronze ahead of Parmod. 

Gagandeep, Mayank Chodhary and Ayush Jawla were the others to make the men’s final.

In the junior final, Varun found himself trailing by 2.3 points behind Nikhil Saroha of Uttar Pradesh after 20 shots, but delivered four good shots at an average of 10.6 to win the gold by a three-point margin. Pradhyumn did well to get the bronze ahead of Mayank Choudhary, Samrat Rana, Parmod, Himanshu and Mukesh Nelavalli.

In the youth final, the 15-year-old Chirag Sharma, a bright shooter from Uttar Pradesh, won the gold 1.3 point ahead of Dev Pratap. The youth section had a total of 1514 shooters.

Mayank Choudhary won the bronze ahead of Satvik Gupta, Shiva Narwal, Amit Sharma, Samrat Rana and Mukesh Nelavalli.