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| July 28, 2002 | Sunday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 17,1423 |
Indian duo grab Games first gold
BISLEY (England), July 27: Indian pair Abhinav Bindra and Sameer Ambekar clinched their country’s first medals at the 2002 Commonwealth Games when they won the Men’s 10m Air Rifle pairs event here on Saturday.
Malaysia’s Erman Zakaria and Hamelay Mutalib won silver with pre-event favourites Chris Hector and Nigel Wallace of England taking bronze.
Bindra and Ambekar finished with a new Games record of 1184 points from the six rounds, 20 better than the Malaysians who edged the Englishmen by four points.
Bindra, who was the youngest shooter to take part in the Sydney Olympics at just 17 where he finished 11th, last year won six golds in a row on the European rifle circuit.
The event was held indoors with competitors firing 60 shots at 10 metres using .177 calibre air guns aiming at a black circle on a white paper target.
Meanwhile, Australian pair Nessa Jenkins and Diane Reeves won the Trap pairs gold Saturday.
England’s Anita North and Lesley Goddard took silver with Canada’s Cynthia Meyer and Susan Nattrass clinching bronze.
The Aussie pair won with 90 points, one ahead of the English team with the Canadians on 86 points.
For six-time world champion Nattrass, the bronze was a memorable achievement as it came 26 years after she became the first woman to compete in a trap event at the Montreal Olympics in 1976.
Later, another Australian duo Michael Diamond and Adam Vella won the gold medal in the Men’s Trap pairs shooting.
Ian Peel and Christopher Dean took silver for England while James Birkett-Evans and Michael Wixey won a bronze for Wales.
GYMNASTICS
England’s men’s gymnastics team defended their team title in front of a fanatical home crowd at the Commonwealth Games on Friday, the second gold medal for the home country on the first full day of action.
England scored 162.075 points after a tight battle with Canada, who scored 161.350, with Australia third on 159.1 points, to match their victory at Kuala Lumpur in 1998.
The home team were boosted by strong performances from Craig Heap, with a 9.1 on the horizontal bar, and Kanukai Jackson, who scored a superb 9.55 on the vault with a solid handspring double front somersault, before a roaring capacity crowd of around 6,000 at Manchester’s G-Mex Centre.
Second-placed Canada, dominant for so long in the discipline at the Games, said they had not been affected by the partisan crowd.
“Sure it helped them a lot but it’s good thing to have home crowd advantage. England did a great job and deserved to win,” said Canada’s Alexander Jeltkov.
Lorraine Shaw grabbed the first gold medal for the host country in the athletics when she won the women’s hammer at the Games which opened on Thursday.
CYCLING
Canada and Australia dominated the opening cycling event at the Commonwealth Games Saturday filling the first five places.
The gold went to Canadian Clara Hughes in a time of 34mins 51.66secs over the rural Rivington course in the Lancashire countryside outside Manchester.
The silver went to Anna Millward of Australia 09.11secs back with Lyne Bessette of Canada taking the bronze 18.76 secs back
“My strategy was to go out as well as I could, but if anything I went out too fast on the first lap,” said Hughes.
“For me the time is irrelevant, it’s winning that is important.”
Millward said that she was satisfied taking away the silver medal given the toughness of the competition.
“I found the course really tough, especially doing two laps,” she said.
“The hills are that steep you can’t pace it up, you have to give it everything you’ve got just to get to the top.
“After that I was full of lactic, but I was giving it loads.”
There was disappointment though for Welsh teenager Nicole Cooke, the world junior mountain bike and world junior road race champion.
She struggled to get fully into the race and had to settle for 10th place.—Reuters/AFP
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