India's top shooters to compete in national selection trials 3 and 4

India's top shooters will be seen in action again as the national selection trials 3 & 4 for Group 'A' athletes commence at the Trishul Shooting Range here from Tuesday. These trials will help in selecting the Indian team for the 16th Asian Shooting Championships 2025 in Kazakhstan in August and the ISSF World Cup in Ningbo, China, in September.

The first day of the trials will see the stage 1 qualifying round of rapid fire pistol men, which has been divided into three relays. The three finals of T3, 10m air rifle men, 25m rapid fire pistol men, and 50m 3 positions women are scheduled on the second day of the competitions.

The shooters come into this selection phase following an encouraging run in the double-legged South American ISSF World Cup tour, which marked the beginning of the new international calendar and also the recently concluded Munich leg of the World Cup.

Across all three legs in Argentina, Peru, and Munich, the Indian shooters reached 39 finals, including mixed-team medal rounds, and brought home a total of 19 medals, eight of them gold.

Suruchi Singh, who created history by becoming the first Indian to win gold in three consecutive world cups, Munich gold medallists Arya Borse and Arjun Babuta, Olympic medallists Manu Bhaker, Sarabjot Singh and Swapnil Kusale, current World Cup medallists Saurabh Chaudhary, Rudrankksh Patil, Elavenil Valarivan, Sift Kaur Samra, Vijayveer Sidhu and Chain Singh along with prominent names like Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar, Sandeep Singh, Varun Tomar and Kiran Ankush Yadav will be part of the trials.

As per the selection criteria, only eligible shooters in Group 'A' will be allowed to participate.

The selection trials 3 & 4 will cover all Olympic rifle and pistol events and will be limited to a select group of top-ranked shooters. This includes 50 slots each for 10m air rifle (men & women) and 10m air pistol (men & women), 30 slots each for 50m rifle 3 positions (men & women), 20 slots for 25m rapid fire pistol (men), and 30 slots for 25m sport pistol (women).