The 2008 Olympic Silver medallist (and Olympic Champion in the 50m Pistol event) Jin Jong Oh of Korea led today’s match from the first to the last shot, leaving no space to his opponents.
Qualified with 590 points, he stared the match with one point of advantage on his followers. An advantage which he enlarged shot after shot, scoring 101.1 points in the final, finishing in first with a total score of 691.1 points. Jin did not win a world cup medal in this event since 2010, but his comeback did not surprised the expert. With about 60 days to go to the XXX Olympic Games, the champions are peaking. Jin is focusing on the Games - as he said – as in London he is looking for the brightest medal, again.
His closest opponents, China’s Olympic medallist Tan Zongliang, currently ranked first in the world in this event, finished in second place, with an overall score of 686.5 points. The 40-year old shooter qualified with 589 points, scoring then 97.9 points in the final, winning his second world cup medal in a row after his victory at the previous ISSF World Cup Stage in Milan, last week. Tan had to fight against the Turkish finalist Yusuf Dikec, who pocketed the Bronze medal climbing up form the fifth place by shooting 100.5 points in the final, to finish on the podium with a total of 686.5 points. Dikec played indeed a great final, climbing up to the second place, and just an unlucky last shot of 8.4 points pushed him down in third place, 0.4 points behind Tan.
Spain’s Pablo Carrera, 25, closed the round in fourth place, more than 1 point far from the medal. The first-time world cup finalist qualified for the match with 586 points like Dikec, and then shot 99.3 points in the final totalizing 685.3 points.
The Youth Olympic Games Champion Denys Kushnirov, the guy who had received his Youth medal from the hands of Sergy Bubka in Singapore in 2010, made it to today’s final with 585 points. Kushnirov scored then 99.2 points in the final to finish in fifth with 684.2 points, after marking a frustrating 8.5 which kept him far from the medals. The 19-year old Ukrainian shooter had won a Bronze medal at the London’s pre-Olympic Wolrd Cup, in April, climbing up the world ranking to the seventh place.
China’s 2012 World Cup Final Silver medallist Zhang Tian, Russia’s 2004 and 2008 Olympic Bronze Vladimir Isakov, and Ukraine’s 2008 World Cup Final Winner Oleg Omelchuk, closed today’s final in sixth, seventh and eighth place with 684.1, 683.6 and 681.9 points, respectively.
The ISSF Rifle and Pistol World Cup in Munich will be closed tomorrow by the last two medal matches, the 10m Air Pistol Women and the 50m Rifle 3 Positions Men events, taking place at 13.00 and 13.45 (GMT+1)