BANGALORE, June 8: JASPAL RANA, in a splendid performance, equalled the world record score while Abha Dhillon's disqualification brought contrasting emotions to the shooting event of the fourth National Games at the Jagdale N Radhakrishna Memorial Shooting Range here on Sunday.

Jaspal, who has been in and out of the sport recently, shot 590 to equal the world record in the centre fire pistol set by a Russian in 1989. He did better than the existing Asian Games record of 589.

Dhillon of Uttar Pradesh, paid dearly for shooting before the command to load the cartridges was given. She was leading at the end of the qualifying rounds.

In the precision round Rana had scores of 49, 49, 49, 50, 47 and 49 while in the duelling round he fired 49, 50, 50, 49, 50, 49 to accumulate 590 points.Naresh Kumar of Madhya Pradesh finished 21 points behind Jaspal to take the silver, while Ashok Pandit finished just a point away to take the bronze.The team gold was bagged by Delhi with a cumulative score of 1704 with contributions from Jaspal (590), Vivek Singh (566) and Rajeev Sharma (548). Parvinder Singh (557), Munir Ahmed (558) and Naresh Kumar (569) hepled Madhya Pradesh (1684) secure a silver while the bronze went to Rajasthan (1673: Mohinder Singh 567, Manjunath 554, Poonam kumar 552).Harvinder Kaur of Maharashtra fired a series of unerring shots in the final to bag the gold. It was only twice that her score went below-10. With a score of 540, she had finished third at the end of the qualifying round, behind the leaders Abha Dhillon (547) and Ritu Choudhary (542) of Uttar Pradesh. Vandana Nerkar of Maharashtra ended up third while Ritu had to settle for silver.

Earlier, the team title went in favour of Uttar Pradesh with Abha Dhillon shooting 547 while Ritu Choudhary and Aradhana Sharma contributing 542 and 524 respectively. Maharashtra with a cumulative score of 1585 (Harvinder 540, Sheila Kanungo 520, Vandana Nerkar 525) took the silver.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.