Indian Men Compound Team won Cosecutive Gold Medals as India bag Five Medals at the Gwangju Archery World Cup Stage II
Men team comprising of Abhishek Verma, Rajat Chauhan & Aman Saini showed exemplary form to beat France yet again in the final of the Compound Men competition. They had met the same team last month in Antalya at Finals and came out with flying colors winning the First World Cup Gold for India in the year.
In todays final India started slowly and were trailing by a point midway but France came up with a 56 in the third round to India’s perfect score which gave India immediate advantage. Going into the last round India was 174-171 and didnt let go of the opportunity scoring 58 which practically took France out of the game.
Source AAI
Mohan Bhardwaj Grabbed Silver
While the top three ranked Indians in the qualifying who made the team, the fourth ranked Mohan Bhardwaj who was writing his own script. The Uttarakhand Archer was in subline form through the Individual competition. During the qualifying he came up with a score of 694 which had put him on the 42nd position on the seedings. He faced two Aussies in the first two rounds and he knocked them over with a 146 score in each rounds.
The Pre-Quarterfinals saw a different Mohan Bhardwaj when he scored a 149 to defeat Jozef from Slovakia 149-145. Mohan might consider him lucky that in the Quartefinals Yang completly missed one arrow to an otherwise perfect score. He scored 140/140 but the missed arrow costed him and Mohan won 147-140.
Looks like mister perfect is collecting gold medals 🥇this season at the Hyundai Archery World Cup #ArcheryWorldCup pic.twitter.com/tdanHtHYO9
— World Archery (@worldarchery) May 21, 2022
In came the SemiFinals he was up against the Austrian Nico and in a low scoring affair Mohan scraped through 143-141. The Final was always going to be difficult as he was up against the World No1 Mike Schloesser from Netherlands. Mike had won the Gold in Antalya as well.
While Mike missed 1 point in the first round to score 29, he didnt miss the 10s in either of the subsequent arrows to score an unprecedented 149 to Mohan’s 141.
Although Mohan lost the match but it would a great confidence booster for the 32 year old whose world ranking is currently at 223 and has never made it to top 150 in the world.
Compound Women & Mixed Team win Bronze Medals
Abhishek Verma after winning the Gold Medal with the Team, attended the ceremony and quickly was back in the ground to compete for the Braoze Medal against Turkey along with Avneet Kaur. It was not looking good for India as they were trailing till they shot the last arrow and needed a miracle to win the medal. And it did happen Suzer who needed a 10 to close the match or a 9 to tie it actually held on for quite long under pressure and bolted a 8 to lose the match.
It was great to see the jubiliation of Abhishek Verma which showed Indian team was equally suprised with the win.
The Women team had defeated Turkey 232-231 earlier in the week to win the bronze Medal. They had recieved a bye in the first round due to less participants.
Recurve Archers Dissapointed, Jayanta shined
With Korean archers back in the fray and Chinese Taipei already particiapating it was going to difficult for all the other archers. However this was a very dissapointing performance from the Recurve Archers as none made it to top 10 in the qualifying seedings. The only highlight being Jayanta Talukdar who blanked the Tokyo olympic champion 6-0 and took a lead of 5-1 over the three time world Champion Kim Woojin to only lose it in the tie breaker even after scoring 10.
The Reason
Source World Archery
The Women Team of Komalika Bari, Ankit Bhakat & Ridhi did really well to defeat Chinese Taipei 6-2 to grab the Bronze Medal. They had earlier lost to South Korea 2-6 after defeating Mexico & Brazil in the earlier rounds.
Source World Archery
