It's A Double Delight For India At The Shooting World Cup As Anjum-Divyansh And Manu-Saurabh Clinch Gold Medals

Shooting is no more an individual sport. Head-to-head duel, which was missing from the sport, has finally arrived.

And the Indian shooters reacted to the introduction of new rules by winning gold medals in the 10m air rifle and 10m air pistol mixed events at the ISSF World Cup in Beijing.

To make the mixed events more television friendly, the International Shooting Sports Federation (ISSF) implemented new rules to the team events.

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The new format has qualifications, quarterfinals, semifinals and final where the teams are paired against each other according to their rankings. Top team faces of with the bottom-ranked team, as it happens in archery.

On Thursday, the pair of Anjum Moudgil and Divyansh Singh Panwar won gold in the air rifle event beating China's Yang Haoran and Liu Ruxuan, while in the pistol mixed event, the duo of Saurabh Chaudhary and Manu Bhaker too defeated Chinese, Pang Wei and Jiang Ranxin to win the final.

"It was a new format and I was a little nervous, to be honest, but we did well to beat the Chinese in the end.

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There was a lot of movement in my body, but I think Anjum did well to compensate on my shortcomings," Divyansh told TOI after his match. This was Divyansh's first World Cup medal after he made his debut in the New Delhi edition in February.

The new format was played for the first time, but Divyansh said the one-on-one duel was making it tougher for the shooters. "It is different when you are shooting to beat a team. The pressure is more," he added.

According to the new format, a pair shoots total 50 shots (25 each partner) in the qualification round. The top-eight teams qualify for the quarterfinals, where the top team is paired against the 8th team.

Winners of the 30-shot quarters (40 shots in pistol) then move to the 30-shot semis. At the end, two finalists compete for gold, while the losers of semifinals shoot for bronze.

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In the final, teams shoot on command and the team scoring higher aggregate in each round gets two points, while in case of tie, both teams get one point each. The team that reaches 16 points first is declared winner.

In the air rifle final, Anjum and Divyansh were tied at 15 points with the Chinese. The Indians clinched two points and take their score final to 17 by shooting 20.6 (Anjum 10.1, Divyansh 10.5), while the hosts totaled 20.3 (Liu 9.9, Haoran 10.4).

On the other hand, Manu and Saurabh and a convincing 16-6 win.