Sonam Uttam Maskar Strikes Silver Again! Indian Shooter Shines on ISSF World Cup Final Opening Day

The ISSF World Cup Final Rifle/Pistol/Shotgun is the season-ending showpiece of the International Shooting Sport Federation calendar, as it bringing together the best shooters from across the world who have qualified through their performances at various World Cup stages held throughout the year, and the 2024 edition was held at the iconic Karni Singh Shooting Range in New Delhi, giving Indian shooters the rare advantage of competing in front of a home crowd.

The opening day at the Karni Singh Shooting Range in New Delhi had everything set up for India's bigger names to deliver in front of their home crowd, and then Arjun Babuta, Divyansh Singh Panwar and Rhythm Sangwan all had difficult days under the pressure of that partisan atmosphere, leaving a 22-year-old from Kolhapur to step forward and remind everyone watching exactly why her name had been getting attention all season long.

Sonam Uttam Maskar shot 252.9 in the women's 10m air rifle final after qualifying in fourth position with 632.1, finishing 1.6 points behind China's Huang Yuting who won gold with a world and junior world record score of 254.5, while France's Oceanne Muller took bronze and India had their only medal of the day through a shooter who had already spent the year proving she belonged at this level.

China made the day largely their own by winning three of the four finals contested, with the only interruption coming from France's Camille Jedrzejewski who won the women's 10m air pistol final with a score of 240.8, finishing well clear of silver medallist Liu Heng Yu of Chinese Taipei, while Egypt's Hala Elgohari won bronze in what was the first ISSF medal of her career.

India's Rhythm Sangwan came agonisingly close to a podium finish in the women's 10m air pistol, losing out to Elgohari by just 0.5 points at the end of the 20th shot, while Surbhi Rao finished fifth with 176.6.

Sonam had already shown what she was capable of earlier in the season by winning silver at the Cairo World Cup in Egypt, finishing with 252.1 in the eight-woman final at the Egypt International Olympic City Shooting Range, and the New Delhi silver was both her first medal at World Cup final level and India's first of the entire competition.

Sportscapebelieves that on a day when shooters with far bigger reputations and far more experience behind them struggled to find their best at home, Sonam Uttam Maskar went out and produced a performance that earned India their only medal, which is the kind of quiet, unshowy consistency that tends to define the athletes who last the longest at the highest level of any sport and for Indian shooting looking ahead to the next Olympic cycle, a 22-year-old who delivers when it matters without needing the occasion to be perfectly set up for her is a very good thing to have.