Olympic hero Vijay Kumar's pistol fetched him two more medals while the seasoned squash duo of Saurav Ghosal and Joshana Chinappa clinched the individual gold in contrasting styles on the fourth day of competitions in the 35th National Games here today.
The Services Sports Control Board, aiming for a hat-trick of overall championship wins, continued to be dominant and have so far accumulated 20 gold, 4 silver and 9 bronze medals to total 33. Haryana rode on a strong wrestling performance to be second with 18 gold, 7 silver and 4 bronze, totalling 29, followed by Maharshtra (10 gold, 16 silver, 11 bronze = 37).
Vijay, after emerging on top in both the team and individual 25m centre fire pistol events yesterday, completed a hat-trick of gold when he combined with Gurpreet Singh and Omkar Singh to ensure a numero uno finish for SSCB in the 25m standard pistol men's team competition.
However, the London Olympic silver-medallist settled for a bronze in the individual event with a score of 565. The individual gold was clinched by his SSCB teammate Gurpreet Singh (572) with Madhya Pradesh's Mahendra Singh (568) fetching the silver.
Services dominated the 10m rifle event as well with Chain Singh Manhas, who won the 50m rifle prone gold yesterday, added a second yellow metal to his kitty by finishing on top again today. Manhas scooped the gold by a whisker totalling 205.9 against Uttar Pradesh's Akhil Sheoran, who shot a score of 205.8. Another Uttar Pradesh shooter -- Sathyam Chauhan -- was a distant third after scoring 183.5.
However, Haryana pipped them in the team competition with the trio of Sanjeev Rajput, Prasanth and Deepak Kumar clinching the gold ahead of Manhas, Ravi Kumar and Ashok Chavan. The bronze went to the Uttar Pradesh team of Akhil Sheron, Sathyan Chauhan and Rajendra Rai.
The squash competition here saw complete domination by Tamil Nadu as all the finalists in both the men's and women's competition belonged to the state. First up was women's singles in which the seasoned Joshana Chinappa did not have much trouble in sailing past Lakshya R 11-5 11-8 11-4 to nab the gold medal.
The bronze medals went to yesterday's losing semifinalists -- Urwashi Joshi of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh's Sachika Ingale.
