Young Gaayathri humbles seniors for 3P gold

Young Gaayathri humbles seniors for 3P gold Tamil Nadu's junior shooter Gaayathri N humbled her seniors including Anjali Bhagwat and Tejaswini Sawant to win women's 3position gold at the 60th National shooting championships here on Thursday. Gaayathri, 20, was fifth to qualify for the eight-woman final after scoring 577 in the qualifications. In the final, she shot 450.3 to become national

champion. Kerala's Elizabeth Koshi, who has graduated to the senior category only last year, won silver with 445.3. Pune's Anjali won bronze with 431.9. Gaayathri got off to a good start by shooting well in the kneeling series of 15 shots. She shot 150.8 to gain lead in the 45-shot final. She maintained her lead by 151.8 in the prone series. She had a little trouble in the standing series, as she scored 98.5 from 10 shots, but that didn't bother her much as she already had a lead of around four points over Anjali, who was running for silver at that time.

In the qualifications, Maharashtra's Sawant qualified for the final on top. She scored 586 in the qualifications to create a new meet record and equalled Elizabeth's national record that she had shot at Munich World Cup last year.

Tejaswini teamed up with Anjali and Priyal Keni to win team gold in the same event with a total of 1,729. Haryana's trio of Aditi Singh, Kajal Saini and Meena Kumari totaled 1,715 to win silver, while Gaayathri combined with Sandhya W and V Srinithi Abirami to give Tamil Nadu bronze with 1,707 points.