Saurabh Chaudhary tops shooting selections trials, makes it back to Indian pistol team for World Cups

Chaudhary will now be part of the Indian shooting squad heading to the World Cups in Peru and Argentina in April. His last appearance in the Indian team was in 2023 at the Asian Championships, where he finished a lowly 35th, after a poor qualifying session that saw him put up only 569 on the board.

Chaudhary’s omission from the national squad came after not putting up consistently high scores in trials and national competitions, something that has become crucial in a domestic scenario where scores are often higher than those in international competitions. Chaudhary was unable to keep up with his Indian teammates, hitting the high 580s, and started to fade out of the national picture.

It also didn’t help the 22-year-old that his association with pistol coach Amit Sheoran ended soon after the Tokyo Olympics, which saw an immediate drop in scores and subsequently, his form. Rather than hitting scores in the high 570s and 580s, Chaudhary’s scores dropped to the 550-560 range, with one of his worst performances coming at the 2023 National Games in Goa where he shot a 557, an obvious indicator that all was not well.

But since the Paris Olympics, the Uttar Pradesh shooter has started to regain some of the form that made him an Asian Games gold medallist. Chaudhary has been a part of six official qualifications since the Paris Olympics. Out of those, his best four scores have been a 580, two 584s and a 591, that he hit at the National Shooting Championships in New Delhi in January. That score meant that Chaudhary was part of the Nationals final line-up for the first time since 2021 – a four year gap in which he fell down to as low as 56th out of 201 in the National Rifle Association of India’s 10m Air Pistol rankings.