Indian debacle continues at Rio

The shooters started the slide first on Monday when the pair of three-time Olympian Manavjit Singh Sandhu and debutant Kynan Chenai finished 16th and 19th respectively in the men’s trap qualification. 

Their exits came after Gagan Narang, a bronze medalist at the 2012 London Games, crashed out of the 10m air rifle event as Bindra claimed seventh place. Around the time that Sandhu and Chenai were eliminated, Bindra missed out on an Olympic bronze by an agonising 0.1. 

The 39-year-old Sandhu — who participated in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 summer Games and has won at every major tournament barring the Olympics — moved from his overnight position of 17th to 11th and then shot a perfect fourth round of 25 to be placed at eighth. That improved to seventh, but in the end he trailed off to finish at 16th. 

Later, the two Indian swimmers, Sajan Prakash and Shivani Kataria, had to settle with only their heats. In the women’s 200m freestyle, Shivani was second in her heats but didn’t qualify on the basis of other classification points of swimmers from other heats. She finished 28th out of the total 29 swimmers. 

In the men’s 200m butterfly heats, Sajan finished a disappointing fourth out of five swimmers and didn’t come close to qualifying for the finals. In the end, Sajan finished 41st amongst the 43 swimmers on the basis of his timings. Sajan clocled 1 min 59.37 secs in his heat and failed to qualify for the next round. 

India’s fiasco in archery continued when India’s Laxmirani Majhi was eliminated from the women’s individual archery losing  1-7 to Slovakia’s Alexandra Longova. 

Majhi, one third of the women’s archery unit that was beaten by two points their Russian counterparts a day earlier, lost the first two sets of her event, drew the third and then lost the final.