Abhinav Bindra became the fourth Indian shooter to clinch an Olympic quota berth for the Rio Games in 2016.
The ace shooter, who won gold at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, scored 122.4 in the final after qualifying with a tally of 627.5 in the 10m air rifle final at the ISSF Shooting World Cup in Munich on Thursday.
He joins pistol shooter Jitu Rai, rifle shooters Apurvi Chandela and Gagan Narang, who all had sealed berths earlier.
Rai won India's first Olympic quota place at the World Championships in Granada, Spain, last year after winning silver in the 50m Free Pistol event.
Apurvi Chandela made sure of a place at Rio by winning a 10m air rifle bronze at the World Cup (Rifle/Pistol) in Changwon, Korea in April, while Gagan Narang, who won bronze at the London Olympics in the 10m air rifle, secured a quota place by winning bronze in the men's 50m prone event at the Fort Benning World Cup.
On Thursday, at the 1972 Olympic Shooting Range in Hochbrucke, China’s Zhu Qinan, the 30-year old former Olympic champion, won the gold medal scoring 206.0 points while Russian Federation’s Vladimir Maslennikov, took silver with 205.7 points.
Oleh Tsarkov, 27, from the Ukraine, who finished with 184.2 points, claimed the first Olympic quota place for Rio 2016 to be assigned on the day.
Belarus’s Vitali Bubnovich, a 40-year-old who already took part in three Olympic Games, finished fourth with 163.5 points, while 19-year-old Chinese Chinese Haoran Yang was fifth.
The 32-year-old Bindra, India's first individual Olympic medallist, Serbia’s Stevan Pletikosic, 43, who nailed a score of 99.1 and placed seventh, bagged the two remaining Olympic quota places that were up for grabs in Thursday’s final.
Each country can win a maximum of 30 quota places from a total of 15 shooting disciplines (including shotgun events), two each from each discipline.
Image: Abhinav Bindra
Photograph: Jeff Gross/Getty Images
