INCHEON, South Korea: After a few days without medal-winning performances, Qatar yesterday turned around their fortunes with a sensational gold medal in the Double Trap Men’s Team competition.
After five days of literally scraping the barrel in their hunt for a medal and having to put up with a couple of unsavoury headlines, the trio of Rashid Al Athba, Masoud Al Athba and Hamad Al Marri gave the Qatari delegation something to cheer about by shocking favourites China in one of the toughest competitions that the sport of shooting has to offer.
The double trap is a shotgun event where the shooter has to hit two flat clay discs that are released simultaneously at a high speed. It gives the competitor only fractions of a second to hit the second target after having had a go at the first from a distance of 16 yards, thus calling for high levels of concentration and tremendous capacity to shut out the outside world.
Yesterday at the Gyeonggido Shooting Range some two hours away from the city, the Qataris did just that as the Al Athbas and Al Marri shot 404 out of 450 targets cumulatively to tie with China’s Hu Binyuan, Mo Junjie and Kuwait’s Fehaid Al Deehani, Ahmad Al Afasi and Hamad AL Afasi.
It was one of those very rare instances when the three top teams had shot the same score, but Qatar were declared the winners based on their cumulative total in the fifth and final round in which the trio shot 84 out of 90, with Hamad hitting 29, Rashid 27 and Al Marri 28 of their individual 30 targets.
That gave the Qataris a slender one-shot final round edge over the Chinese who could only manage silver with 83 with Mo Junjie proving the weak link, missing four out of his individual 30 targets. The Kuwaitis took bronze with 81 in the final round with all three shooting 27 each.
The Qataris were understandably delighted at their success, coming as it did six days after the shooting competitions began.
With many in Qatar’s large shooting team failing to get past the qualifiers in individual events, yesterday’s team success also came as a balm to soothe their frayed nerves.
“Finally we managed to win a medal, and that too a gold,” Rashid Al Athba told journalists from Qatar during a brief interaction with them at the Athletes Village.
“The competition was very tough as the scores indicate but we somehow came through. Luck was on our side,” he added.
Al Marri said the team competition required utmost concentration.
“You have to try and do your best. It’s a competition where you can’t keep track of your rivals’ scores. You just have to go there and perform in the heat of the competition and hope for the best,” he added.
Qatar also owe their success to the revised rules of the competition which were amended last year according to which in case of a tie only the cumulative scores of the final round would count.
The earlier rule required a shoot-off which could have been a lottery with the performers again having to go through the mentally draining exercise of having to be at their best after the regular rounds.
“This is great news for Qatar and would help lift the morale of not only the shooters but also other competitors representing Qatar in the Asian Games,” Qatar Shooting Federation President Mohamed Ali Al Madeed said.
“Hopefully we can build on this at the Asian Games and go on to win a few more medals, not just in shooting but also in other sports.”
Earlier, Rashid Al Athba missed a bronze medal in the individual double trap, losing out to UAE’s Shaikh Juma bin Dalmouk Al Maktoum. Sheikh Juma shot 29 out of 30 in their shoot-off while Al Athba managed one less. China’s Hu Binyuan won the event by cracking 26 out of 30 targets while Kuwait’s former two-time Asian Games gold medallist Fehad Al Dhehani had to settle for silver. QOC
