Ramita, Vijayveer and Anish impress in qualification competition

Kerala’s Susan Florentina (in red) attempts to score against Uttar Pradesh in the National Games basketball in Dehradun on Wednesday. | Photo: Stan Rayan

DEHRADUN: Vidarsa K. Vinod must have rubbed her eyes a few times when she looked at the women’s 10m air rifle qualification round score-board midway through the series at the 38^th National Games shooting competition which began at the new Trishul Range here on Wednesday.

Despite having two Olympians in the fray, in Ramita Jindal and Elavenil Valarivan, the Kerala girl led the qualification event for some time. But as the series wore on, Haryana’s Ramita showed her class and finished on top with a very impressive 634.9 points. Vidarsa, in fourth place (633.0), and Gujarat’s Elavenil (631.9) were among those who also made the eight-woman final.

Meanwhile in the men’s 25m rapid fire pistol event, Olympians Vijayveer Singh Sidhu (Punjab, 587) and Anish Bhanwala (Haryana, 582) took the top two spots in qualification competition. But Himachal Pradesh’s Vijay Kumar, the 2012 London Olympics silver medallist, failed to make the cut with a weak final series.

In basketball, men’s defending champion Punjab defeated Madhya Pradesh while National championship runner-up Kerala, the favourite for the women’s title, crushed Uttar Pradesh 76-37 in the league phase.

The results:

Basketball (league): Men: Punjab 106 (Kanwar Gurbaz Singh 32) bt MP 72 (Prakash Mishra 20, Rakesh Kumar Sharma 20); Karnataka 100 (B.K. Anil Kumar 20) bt Uttarakhand 59 (Vaibhav 31); Delhi 94 (Prince Tyagi 30, Arvinder Singh 20, Joginder Singh 17) bt Rajasthan 75 (Mohammed Ishan 25).

Women: Kerala 76 (R. Sreekala 12, Susan Florentina 11) bt UP 37 (Poonam Chaturvedi 18); Karnataka 71 (Sanjana Ramesh 22, T. Mohanbala 18) bt Delhi 59 (Preeti Kumari 24).