Shagun Chowdhary flops at Women's Trap

With shooting giving another medal in the form of a silver to Vijay Kumar in the 25m Rapid Fire Pistol event, expectations were again high that India could be in the contention for another medal in yet another shooting event. This time it was the Women’s Trap event in which Shagun Chowdhary was representing India. There was no hype surrounding this event before, but since Vijay Kumar’s silver medal from the same position ensured that Shagun had all eyes trained on her. Her qualification score for this event was higher than most other shooters, with only a handful scoring better than her.

In the Trap event, a shooter has 3 rounds of 25 targets each. One target would be released upon the shooter’s command and she can take 2 shots to hit the target. Points would be given based on whether the target was hit or not. After the qualification stage, the top 6 shooters would progress to the final round to fight it out for the medals.

Shagun started well by hitting the targets, but quickly missed 2 which put immense pressure on her as there were 4 shooters who were hitting the targets without even a single miss. But she kept her composure and finished the first round with a score 23/25. While it wasn’t close enough to the top 6, there was still a chance that she could make it into the final. But she completely lost it in the second round, which she ended by missing 8 out of her 25 shots, consigning her to last place and practically out of the reckoning. The final round was redundant for Shagun as she had no chance whatsoever and she finished the event with a score of 61 out of a possible 75 and placing 22 overall.

While the expectations may have been more than what would have been the case if yesterday’s events did not occur, Vijay Kumar did show that all it needed was a good performance on the day to clinch the medal. Attention now turns to Gagan Narang again for his participation in the Rifle 3 Positions event and would once again be expected to get a medal.