Gold with the last shot: Batsarashkina became the Olympic champion in air pistol shooting

The first day of the Tokyo Olympics began for the Russian national team with Anastasia Galashina's medal in air rifle shooting.

Good news from the Asaka shooting range was worth waiting for a day later.

On Sunday morning, medals were played there for girls who know how to accurately shoot from a pneumatic pistol.

In this exercise, the Russian team rightly counted on one more medal. Five years ago, a very young Vitalina Batsarashkina made a splash when she first won the qualification and then won a silver medal, losing only to the Chinese woman Zhang Mengxue. Since then, the native of Omsk has only become more experienced and managed to become the world champion in a mixed team. Batsarashkina confirmed her readiness for the second Olympics at the last European Championship, winning two personal medals and two more with her teammates.

Batsarashkina did not start her qualification in a pneumatic pistol very well, losing either five points per session or three. But in the second half of the competition, the Russian woman practically did not misfire and did not hit the top ten only seven times. In total, she scored 582 points and reached the final from third place. The second Russian participant Margarita Chernousova was far from such a result. She took only 35th place and, like her husband Artyom Chernousov the day before, finished the fight ahead of schedule.

The best in the selection was the Chinese Jiang Zhanxin.

In each of the six ten-shot sessions, she did not score less than 97 points.

She finished the qualification with an incredible streak of 18 hits in the top ten, so she not only took first place, but also repeated the world record for this stage of the competition.

The current record holder Anna Korakaki from Greece, who won bronze in Rio, took second place between the Chinese woman and Batsarashkina.

At the start of the finals, Jiang Rhanxin quieted down.

In the first series of five shots, she did not score a total of 50 points, as did her teammate Lin Yuemei.

Batsarashkina immediately earned 51.1 points, missing only once in a circle with a ten.

The Russian woman could single-handedly lead if not for Antoaneta Kostadinova from Bulgaria, who showed exactly the same result.

After the next approach to the line, Batsarashkin was left alone on the first line.

For the knockout fight, she created a good reserve of 101.3 points, 0.6 points ahead of Kostadinova and 1.9 points ahead of the 2004 Olympic champion Elena Kostevich from Ukraine.

Jiang Rhanxin and Lin Yuemei were frequent with nines and dropped out of the top three.

The shooting playoffs started worse for the Russian athlete than could have been expected.

Starting with a confident hit in the top ten, Batsarashkina did not get close to the center of the target in the next four shots and even earned only 8.8 points once.

She even managed to drop to third place, but nevertheless, by the third round, she climbed to second.

By that time, the gap from Kostadinova had increased to 1.8 points.

Also on russian.rt.com Through hardships to the podium: how Artamonov won bronze after losing the first fight at the Tokyo Olympics

In the fourth round, everything went on as usual.

The remaining five athletes continued to shoot, when suddenly Batsarashkina had problems with the shot.

She decided to perform it later than the rivals, and the judges considered that the time for an attempt had already expired.

After a little trial, they admitted their mistake and allowed the shot to be fired again.

Fortunately, this did not affect the result in any way.

Although the Russian woman scored not the highest 9.5 points, she remained in the fight, while Lin Yuemei left the line.

The fourth superfluous in the dispute for medals was Kostevich.

In her last round, no shot earned the required ten points.

Jiang Zhanxin, on the other hand, got 10.8 points in the first attempt, and at that moment it began to seem that Batsarashkina would not rise above the third place.

But then the Chinese woman made a gross mistake, and the gap between them was reduced to 0.1 points.

The dispute for silver continued in the next round, and the Russian woman confidently prevailed in it.

Jiang Rhanxin scored only 9.3 points twice.

Batsarashkina not only got ahead of her, but also began to approach Kostadinova.

All this time, the Bulgarian athlete did not leave the first line, but four shots outside the top ten did not allow her to feel confident anymore.

Finally, they were left to play the gold together.

Kostadinova began the final round with a 10.1 point hit, but Batsarashkina responded with an even more accurate shot and reduced the gap to half a point.

After that, the same drama ensued to be in the final of the air rifle shooting.

Only now Kostadinova turned out to be in the role of Galashina.

The Bulgarian athlete made her worst shot of the whole day, and Batsarashkina did not forgive her for this - the 24-year-old Russian woman won the first gold both for herself and for the entire team at the Tokyo Olympics.

Her total amount in the final was 240.3 points and at the same time brought her an Olympic record.

Since 2004, Russian shooters have not been able to win the Olympic Games. In a pneumatic pistol for women, a losing streak lasted 25 years. But the competition in Tokyo for Batsarashkina does not end there. She will also compete in the Mixed Team Pneumatic Shooting Tournament and will try to prove herself in a standard pistol. On July 27 and 28, she will return to the shooting range, already in the status of an Olympic champion.