Qatar’s pairing of Rashid Saleh Al-Athba and Reem Al Sharshani came from four shots down just after the halfway point in their skeet mixed team final against France 1 to win World Cup gold in Cairo on the final day of the event.
When Al-Athba missed his first shot in the fourth of the six rounds the gap between his team and the French pairing of Eric Delaunay and Lucie Anastassiou, who had both shot maximums on their previous round, began to look unbridgeable.
But then a sudden drop in form by the latter shooter in her penultimate round, when she missed all five clays, tipped the contest towards the Qatari pairing, who went into the final round with a one shot lead in a competition taking part in unpredictable winds.
With all but Al-Athba missing one target in the final round of an event that will feature for the first time at the Paris 2024 Olympics it meant that Qatar eventually took gold 38-36.
For the 31-year-old Anastassiou, who had suffered a similar dip in the women’s skeet final which dropped her out of a bronze medal position that was eventually filled by Al Sharshani, this was another bittersweet day.
Earlier on the shotgun range at the Egypt International Olympic City the bronze medal went to the Mexican pairing of Luis Gallardo Oliveros and Gabriela Rodriguez, who defeated a United States 2 team comprising Christian Elliott and Caitlin Connor 39-32.