BANGALORE, June 9: Joydeep Banerjee of West Bengal bettered the National Games record in the free rifle three position event to bag one more gold for West Bengal on the penultimate day of shooting event at the Jagdale N Radhakrishna memorial shooting range at the SAI Southern Centre, Kengeri near here on Monday.Joydeep not only did Bengal proud by bagging the gold but with a record total of 1210.6, he erased the mark of 1189.7 points by Vishwajit Shinde in 1994 at Bombay.After the end of the qualifying rounds, Joydeep finished 26 points ahead of Tamil Nadu shooter B Nag. Though B Nag shot an array of near-perfect shots in the final, Joydeep's score was out of his reach.B Nag accumulated 91.6 points from 10 cards to Joydeep's 86.6 and had to settle for silver. Raj Kumar of Madhya Pradesh, who began on his preliminary score of 1097, added 91.4 points in the final to tally 1188.4 and take the bronze.The other contenders, apart from medal winners, were Praveen Rawat (Delhi, 1097), Vishwajit Shinde (Maharashtra, 1100), Ghisalal Yadav (Rajasthan 1088), Nepal Singh (Rajasthan, 1077) and F Thomas (Kerala, 1081). Incidentally, all eight shooters finished in the same order as at the end of the qualifying round.It was also a great day, for Rajasthan who bagged their first gold of the championship, when they claimed the team honours. With Ghisulal Yadav shooting 1088 points, Nepal Singh and Girdhari Lal firing 1077 and 1056 points respectively, the team's total swelled to 3221, which was enough to beat the rest of the teams.Bengal had to settle for bronze as Joydeep was not ably supported by his team-mates Shyamal Das and Amarnath Banerjee. Shyamal shot 1025 while Amarnath shot 1056 to accumulate 3205 points. Delhi with a total of 3209 claimed the silver through Praveen Rawat (1097), Amanveer Singh Wadalia (1056) and Mangesh Panwar (1056).In the other events of the day, Ashok Pandit of Maharashtra, who had won seven gold at the last National Games, figured at the top in the rapid fire pistol event.Pandit was leading with a cumulative score of 279 points and was followed by Mohindra Singh of Rajasthan on 275. Rajeev Sharma of Delhi was four points behind the leader while Munir Ahmed (MP), M Kumar (Tamil Nadu) and Vivek Singh (Delhi) were tied at 273 points each.
