ISSF World Cup: Heena Sidhu bags silver despite hassles

New Delhi: Heena Sidhu Pandit shot her way to a creditable second place in the 10-metre Air-Pistol Shooting event of the ISSF World Cup being held at Fort Benning, Atlanta-Georgia in USA.

She had to overcome the nightmare of having to run around for a couple of days to procure a permit for her weapons on landing at the Atlanta Airport. She exhibited nerves of steel from the moment she stepped at the USA Army Marksmanship Range to shoot a total of 386 in the preliminaries that gave her second place behind the eventual winner Boneva Antoaneta of Bulgaria.

In the finals she shot 200.8, a bit adrift from her world record 203.8 which she had shot a few months ago.

The running around and the uncertainty did take a toll as the score suggests. However, the showing may give Heena the top spot in the world rankings according to Ashok Pandit, the Hon. Secretary of the Maharashtra Rifle Association.

The Bulgarian shot 203.6 while Zorana Arunovic, the former World champion from Serbia took the third spot with a tally of 180.9 points. Another Indian, Malaika Goel from Punjab made an impression in the preliminaries by tallying 385 points to claim 3rd place but wasn’t sharp thereafter. She finished sixth overall.

Heena and her husband-cum-coach Ronak Pandit’s woes started the moment they landed at Atlanta where they were shocked to learn that the US weapon permit was not ready and she had to deposit the arms with the Customs authorities. Both of them had to dash to Columbus, about 100km away to meet the organisers of the competition. Frantic calls and pleas to the organisers and to the authorities in India proved futile resulting in a cloud over her participation. Yet, both of them doggedly persuaded the matter as they made a couple of trips to the airport.
Finally when they got the permit the guns had gone to the Customs Warehouse and a bit of more runningwas required before they could heave a sigh of relief.

The training she had undergone to meet high pressure contingencies on the field had finally paid off but in a different context altogether to say the least. Heena has now the maximum medals in a World Cup by any Indian pistol shooter. It will serve her in good stead as she prepares for the Commonwealth Games in May where besides the 10 m Air Pistol event she will test her preparedness for the 25 m Sports Pistol event she intends to enter at the 2016 Rio Olympics. She will try to sort out minor problems such as shortage of time which she encountered in the preliminaries when she was forced to shoot the last shot in haste. The time trouble resulted in scoring a 9 to end the preliminaries with scores of 98, 96,96, and 96.