Thiruvananthapuram: Mehuli Ghosh of West Bengal won eight gold medals including four in individual events at the ongoing 61st National Shooting Championship here. On the course of these, she also set four new national records.
Ghosh won the gold medals on offer in Junior Women’s, Youth Women’s, Women’s Civilian and Junior Women’s Civilian categories. The Joydeep Karmakar Shooting Academy trainee also won two bronze medals. The West Bengal Shooter also won the team golds in all these four events with teammates Shreya Bandyopadhyay and Ayushi Podder.
Mehuli had recently secured a Youth Olympic Games berth by winning gold in the Asian Airgun Championship in Waka City of Japan last week.
On her achievement, Olympian Joydeep Karmakar on microblogging site, twitter, wrote “10 medals-8 Gold 2 Bronze 4 National Records in 1 National Championships.The 5 feet shooter stood like tower today!Dont remember any athlete take away so much from one event in Nationals during my 29yrs shooting career.”
In other news from the National Shooting Championships, Elavenil Valarivan of Gujarat, won her first senior national gold in the Women’s 10m Air Rifle.
Young Shooter Elavenil won the gold medal with a new national record score. On course to the medal she bettered the old national record of 249.8, set by Pooja Ghatkar at the Brisbane Commonwealth Shooting Championship in November.
Elavenil was just a decimal point ahead of Olympian Apurvi Chandela prior to the last shot but held her nerves to shoot a 10.5 compared to Apurvi’s 10.4 to eventually win the title by a margin of 0.2 points. Mehuli won the bronze of this event.