Manu Bhaker and Sarabjot Singh won India's second medal of the Paris Olympics, securing bronze in the 10m air pistol mixed team event, for which they had qualified in third place on Monday. They beat South Korea 16-10 in the bronze medal match.
The mixed team is one of shooting's newest Olympic events, having only been introduced at Tokyo 2021. There are only three mixed team events - 10m air rifle and air pistol as well as skeet in shotgun.
INDIA'S OLYMPIC MEDAL TALLY | INDIA AT PARIS OLYMPICS | LATEST OLYMPIC NEWS | KEY DATES AT PARIS 2024
Here's a closer look at how mixed team events in shooting work, with a different scoring system.
Why was mixed team shooting introduced?
Mixed team was another move towards showcasing gender balance in elite sport, an initiative throughout Olympic sport. Men and women now compete for the same number of medals in shooting sport, but the optics came in the form of it being the first time men and women shot simultaneously in the same event. Such examples can also be seen in some other sports, particularly track and field, where mixed relay races were introduced for the Tokyo Olympics as well.
What is the format?
The two shooters' scores are aggregated, so essentially it is still two people playing an individual sport but coming together for their teams. There is barely any interaction between teammates and they mostly continue to shoot in isolation.
First, there is a qualifying stage, where each shooter has 30 shots. The team's total in 60 shots determines where they stand, with the top four qualifying for the medal rounds.
In the medal rounds, two teams go head-to-head. They compete in sets, with each shooter getting one shot per set and the total being the team's score. The winning team gets two points per set. The first team to 16 set points wins.
How is it different from the individual events?
The dynamism added by the head-to-head nature of the mixed team events' medal matches has added a dimension to shooting that it didn't have before.
Most importantly, it gives shooters a fair chance to recover from bad shots in a way that the individual events don't. With their structured eliminations, individual events can be a bit brutal, they demand consistency from the first shot to the last.
Team events don't. You shoot an 8 in one set? Doesn't matter. You put that behind you. It doesn't impact your score for the next set or any subsequent ones. It's why in the final, Sarabjot could afford to start with an 8.6 and yet win a medal. If he had started an individual final with such a score, he'd have been on the backfoot right from the off, but it didn't matter as much in the mixed team event.
How did the format change from Tokyo to Paris?
They did away with one round. In Tokyo, the initial qualification was followed by a second round before the medal matches. Here in Paris, the top four from the initial qualification round qualified for the medal matches straightaway. No in-betweens.
If the Paris format had been in place for Tokyo, India would've had a medal more, as Manu and Saurabh Chaudhary had finished first in the first qualifying round, before finishing seventh in the second qualifying round. Under the current format, Manu and Saurabh would have been fighting for gold or silver. As it turned out, it was one of Indian shooting's biggest-ever heartbreaks.
Do India have a chance in any other mixed team event here in Paris?
India didn't qualify for the 10m air rifle mixed team final, which was the first shooting event of Paris Olympics. The skeet mixed team final remains, but a medal in shotgun remains tough.