Jyothi Surekha Vennam, Abhishek Verma bag medals in indoor series

KOLKATA: The Indian archers are walking the unknown path with great success.

Compound archers Jyothi Surekha Vennam and Abhishek Verma bagged the gold and silver medals respectively in the GT Open, the second leg of this season’s Indoor Archery World Series in Strassen, Luxembourg, on Sunday. The success comes weeks after Atanu Das claimed bronze in the men’s recurve category in the first stage of the series, the Swiss Open in Lausanne.

More than 450 competitors from over 35 nations took part in this 18-metre target circuit event.

It was a tough run for the 28-year-old Vijayawada-based archer Jyothi who qualified fifth in the ranking round with a score of 593. She sailed through her first two rounds with perfect scores of 150, but then had to play the shoot-offs to overcome fourth seed Estonia’s Lisell Jaatma (147-147) and top seed Elisa Roner of Italy (148-148) respectively. In both the quarters and semifinals, she hit perfect 10s in one-arrow shoot-offs to secure her progress.

In the final, reigning Asian Games champion Jyothi prevailed over Paasmeeri Marita of Belgium 147-145.

It was Jyothi’s second medal in indoor events this season after bagging a bronze in the JVD Open championship at Eindhoven, the Netherlands last week.

Verma, on the other hand, made a brilliant start becoming the first Indian to hit a perfect 600 in the qualification round of an international meet to qualify as the top seed. He carried his good form into the elimination round recording perfect scores in three of his five matches to set up a summit clash with legendary Mike Schlosser of the Netherlands. Both archers matched each other arrow to arrow ending up with a score of 150-150 at the end of five ends.

Even in the shoot-off, both archers hit 10, but ‘Mr Perfect’ Schlosser picked up the gold by virtue of having a closer-to-the-centre shot as World No. 9 Verma managed to open his account in the international indoor circuit event.

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