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Finals 25m Pistol Women

Yuan beat her teammate Zhang at the 25m Pistol Women Gold medal match

ISSF World Cup Rifle / Pistol · Munich, GER

Yuan Jing, 26, beat her teammate Zhang Jingjing, 24, in the Gold medal match of the 25m Pistol Women event. Heidi Diethelm Gerber of Switzerland secured Bronze, winning the medal match against unlucky Jo Un Mi of North Korea.

Two Chinese teammates met at today's 25m Pistol Women Gold medal match. Yuan Jing, 26, faced Zhang Jingjing, 24, in the final duel to secure the brightest medal.

 

Yuan beat her teammate with a net score of 7 to 1 points, leaving few chances to her teammate. After tying at the first Gold medal match series, Yuan won all the other series, until she reached seven points, the score needed to win the match. The 26-year old was listed among the favorites, as she knows Munich's shooting range very well. Here, she had already won two ISSF World Cup Gold medals in 2009 and 2011.

 

Zhang secured the Silver medal, with 1 point, after winning a spot for the medal match at the semi-finals. She had won her last ISSF medal in Beijing, in 2010, when she was only 21-year old. This year, she had not won a medal yet, as she had placed in fourth at the ISSF World Cup in Changwon, Korea.

 

Heidi Diethelm Gerber of Switzerland, 44, met People's Republic of Korea 19-year old Jo Un Mi in the Bronze medal match.

 

Diethelm Gerber had made it to the final round at the previous two ISSF World Cup Stages, in Fort Benning and Changwon, finishing in seventh and sixth, respectively, while Jo had never participated in an ISSF match before.

Experience counts, and Diethelm Gerber outscored her young opponents with ease by to, securing the Bronze medal.

 

But the story, here, is not only about the medal.

 

It's about how Jo made it to the medal match.

 

The young North Korean athlete had tied Georgia's 1988 Olympic Champion Nino Salukvadze in fourth place. A shoot-off was needed to decide who was going to be eliminated, and who was going to compete in the Bronze medal match.

 

The Chief Range Officer gave the command: shoot off between Jo and Salukvadze.

 

But Jo did not understand the command.

 

She had never participated in an international match, before, and the finals are all new.

 

She just did not shoot.

 

Salukvadze only needed one hit to win the tiebreaker, but she did not take advantage of the situation. The Georgian shooter fired the five shot, hitting zero targets. The spectators could not believe their eyes.

 

But this is not all.

 

Since the two shooters were still tied, the Chief Range Officer ordered a second shoot-off. Germany's Dorjsuren explained Jo that she had to shoot (what a fair play!), but once again the North Korean shooter had a problem: an allowed malfunction. In the meantime, Salukvadze missed again, five times.

 

When the Chief Range Officer authorized Jo to shoot a third shoot-off series, due to the malfunction, the 19-year old only hit 1 target. But that was enough. The first-time finalist Jo beat the 48-time finalist Salukvadze, with 1 hit out of 10 shoot-off shots.

 

Something like this had never happened before in the history of shooting.

 

Salukvadze was eliminated, together with today's youngest finalist, Joanna Tomala of Poland, 19; the two-time Olympic Bronze medallist Munkhbayar Dorjsuren, 43, of Germany and Inna Klymenko, 24, from Ukraine.

 

Marco Dalla Dea

 

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