Bajrang Lal creates history with rowing gold

The shooters,who have been a pale shadow of themselves at the Aoti shooting range,accounted for a bronze with Manavjit Singh Sandhu,Mansher Singh and Zoravar Singh Sandhu finishing third in the men’s team trap event.

With the addition of four medals,India’s medal tally climbed to two gold,eight silver and ten bronze as they moved one rung up the ladder to the 11th spot. India had finished tenth on the medals table in the last Asian Games in Doha with a tally of 10-17-26.

There was no let-up in China’s strangehold in the Games as they continued their gold harvest to maintain their position atop the table with a whopping tally of 125-54-55.

South Korea (42-36-49) and Japan (24-49-51) were in the second and third position respectively.

Commonwealth champion Dinesh Kumar also had a good as he became the second Indian boxer to assure himself of a medal by advancing to the light heavyweight 81kg semifinals after out-punching Korean Jinho Heo. Paramjeet Samota was the first Indian to assure himself of a bronze by reaching the semifinals of 91+ weight category.

Two other boxers — Vikas Krishan and V Santosh Kumar – also won their respective bouts to cruise into the quarter finals.

Star tennis player Sania Mirza toppled 6th seed Chinese Shuai Zhang to seal a quarter-final berth in the women’s singles while Somdev Devvarman and Karan Rastogi routed their rivals to move into pre-quarterfinals of the men’s singles.

The women’s hockey team also kept themselves in the reckoning for a bronze medal with a thumping 13-0 victory over minnows Thailand but star cuiest Pankan Advani,who fetched India’s first gold medal,was knocked out of the snooker singles competition by China’s Junhui Ding.

It was the 29-year-old Bajrang Lal,an army man,who stole the spotlight today by fetching the second gold medal for India.

Takhar led the 2000m race from start to finish and rowed his way to the gold with a few lengths of boats to spare in 7 minutes and 4.78 seconds.

The gold,that followed the two silver medals won in the men’s light weight event yesterday,took the medal haul from rowing to five.