ISSF World Championships 2022: Rudrankksh Patil wins gold, secures Olympics berth

The young shooter secured the second quota for Paris Olympics after Bhowneesh Mendiratta.

In the ongoing ISSF World Championship 2022, Indian shooter Rudrankksh Balasheb Patil won the gold medal in the men's 10m air rifle event in Cairo, Egypt on Friday. With this win, he also won the quota for Paris 2024 Olympics. This will also give him a slight edge in 2024's Olympic Selection Trials, for which he has gained a bonus point now. Rudrankksh Balasaheb Patil has won the Olympic quota, beating Italy's Danilo Dennis Sollazzo 17-13 in the World Championship gold medal match. This is India's second shooting quota for the 2024 Olympics after Bhowneesh Mendiratta.

The 18-year-old Rudrankksh Patil became the sixth shooting world champion from India after Abhinav Bindra, Tejaswini Sawant, Manavjit Singh Sandhu, Om Prakash Mitherval and Ankur Mittal. India's last World Champion in the men's air rifle event was Abhinav Bindra at Zagreb in 2006. London Olympic bronze medalist Gagan Narang won a bronze medal at the World Championships in Munich in 2010 while Anjum Moudgil won a silver in the women's event in 2018.

Olympic Quota

Apart from India and Italy, China's Lihao Sheng(3rd) and Haoran Yang(4th) and the Czech Republic Jiri Privatsky(5th) secured the Olympic quota. Two points are awarded to the shooter who wins a series in the final and the first shooter who reaches the 16-point mark is declared as the winner. Both Patil and Sollazzo split the first two series at 2 all before the Italian moved into a 10-4 lead after the seventh series.

Rudrankksh Patil and Danilo Sollazzo split the first two series before the Italian moved into a 10-4 lead after the seventh series. In the eighth, both shooters shared a point apiece before Patil took 2 points in the ninth series to make the score 11-7. From here on the 18-year Indian teenager started to come from behind winning again the series to make it 11-9. Although Sollazzo made it 13-9 in the 11th series, Patil won the next four series, never shooting below 10.5 to clinch the gold with a scoreline of 13-17.

In the qualification rounds, Rudrankksh Patil scored 633.9 toppings the round. Another Indian Ankush Jadhav finished eighth in the men's 10m air rifle final. Earlier, the women's junior team of Naamya Kapoor, Vibhuti Bhatia and Esha Singh won a bronze medal in the 25m pistol junior women's team. With Rudrankksh Patil's gold, this is India's second medal at the ongoing shooting world championships.