Incheon: Top Indian shooter Shagun Chowdhary believes the Chinese can be beaten at their game and it is just a matter of time for the rest to play catch up.
A day after teaming up with Shreyasi Singh and Varsha Varman to bag a bronze in women’s double trap team event at the Incheon Asian Games on Thursday, the Jaipur-born Chowdhary asserted that shooters from rest of Asia, particularly India, are fast catching up with China.
The Indian women’s team aggregated 279 to finish on the podium behind China and hosts South Korea at the Gyeonggido Shooting Range on Thursday with Chowdhary shooting 96 after rounds of 24, 25, 24 and 23, while Shreyasi had 94 and Varsha managed 89.
In the double trap individual competition, Chowdhary was best of the trio after being placed eighth, Shreyasi was tenth and Varsha finished 12th.
With such perfomances, the 31-year-old knows that the difference between China and the rest is negligible. “The Chinese have had a sort of head-start, if you can call it. But now, we know we are good enough and we can challenge them. It is just a matter of time when we will be beating them regularly,” Chowdhary told Gulf News.
Employed with Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and currently ranked 28th in the world in trap shooting, Chowdhary is one of several athletes supported by the Prakash Padukone and Geet Sethi backed non-profit organisation ‘Olympic Gold Quest’.
Though she attributes much of her success to her Italian coach Marcello Dradi and her sports psychologist Vaibhav Agashe, Chowdhary got the right direction in shooting when she was introduced to skeet shooting as a tiny two-year-old by her father Sushil, a former shooter and shooting official.
After double trap was discarded as an Olympic Games discipline, Chowdhary made the bold move of shifting to trap shooting. Till now, she stands as the first Indian woman to qualify for the Olympic trap shooting event when she made it to London 2012.
For the moment, Chowdhary is undeterred by the Chinese shooters’ dominance as the next big event — the Asian Shooting Championships in Al Ain — looms on the horizon at the beginning of November. “That [Al Ain] will be our next frontier where we can have a go at them [Chinese shooters]. Besides, there will be other occasions in the future as well,” Chowdhary said.
“We have beaten them [China] in the past and we all know they can be beaten. All of us believe in this. It is just a matter of time,” she smiled.
