Paris. History-making Indian archer Harvinder Singh’s dream of winning a double medal at the Paris Paralympics was shattered on Thursday as he and his partner Pooja Jatian lost to the Slovenian pair in the bronze medal shoot-off. The Indian pair lost 2-6 against top seeded Elisabetta Mizno and Stefano Travisani of Italy despite giving a tough fight in the semi-finals.
In the bronze medal match, fifth seeded Haryana pair Harvinder and Pooja were leading 2-0 but lost the lead twice to lose 4-5 (19-17) to Ziva Lavrinj and Dejan Fabic. After winning the first set 33-30, the Slovenian pair equalised the score by winning the second set 34-29. Harvinder and Pooja bounced back with a 38-33 win in the third set and then took a 4-2 lead. But they failed to finish in their favour. The Slovenian pair won the fourth set 34-29, forcing a shoot-off.
In the shoot-off, Fabcich started off well by scoring 9 points and then Jeeva scored a perfect 10 while Harvinder scored 8 and Pooja scored only 9 points. In the semi-finals, after taking a 36-31 lead in the first set, Mizno and Travisani scored four consecutive 10 points in the second set and took a 4-0 lead.
Pooja and Harvinder took a two-point lead in the third set and then won it 37-35 to make the score 2-4. But the top seeded Italian pair showed patience and did not give any chance to the Indian archers and entered the final by winning the fourth set 38-37. Earlier, the Indian pair had made it to the semi-finals by defeating the Polish team in straight sets.
In the match between the fourth and fifth seeded teams, Poland’s Milena Olevska and Lukasz Ciszek struggled for consistency while Harvinder and Pooja kept the momentum. For India, Rakesh Kumar and Sheetal Devi won the bronze medal in the compound mixed team open event at the Paris Paralympics while Harvinder became the first Indian to win a gold medal in Paralympic archery.
In the first set, Ciszek scored seven and six, which cost Poland dearly. The Indian pair won 35-32. The Indian pair also won the second set 33-32, while the third was won 36-32. Earlier, the Indian pair had defeated Australia’s Timon Kenton Smith and Amanda Jennings in a shootout. The fifth seeded Indian team took advantage of the poor performance of the Australian pair and took a 4-0 lead. They won the first two sets 31-18 and 35-24.
They lost the next two sets 27-33 and 24-33. They won the shoot-off 16-5. In the recurve open category, archers stand at a distance of 70 metres and shoot at a 122 cm target made up of 10 concentric circles, with scores ranging from 10 points to 1 point from the centre outwards. Harvinder, who hails from a farmer family in Haryana, was just 1.5 years old when he contracted dengue and his legs were damaged due to the side effects of some injections given to him. Puja lost in the individual quarter-finals on Tuesday. Puja was just two months old in 1997 when she became a victim of medical negligence. She was given the wrong injection for high fever, which led to polio in her left leg.