Produced by: Hitansh Gaur
Designed by: Manoj Kumar
It has been a mixed day for India so far with the Archery team bagging another gold while on the other side ace badminton player PV Sindhu has bowed out after losing in the quarter-final stage.
The Men's team of Compound archery has bagged India’s 21st gold at the Asian Games. Ojas Deotale, Abhishek Verma and Prathmesh Jawkar won the tournament by defeating South Korea with a score of 235-230 in the final. Deotale has also qualified for the final of individual men's compound archery which will be played on Saturday.
The duo of Dipika Pallikal and Harinder Pal Singh clinched the 20th gold for India after winning the Squash mixed doubles final. The Indian pair defeated the Malaysian team by a score of 2-0.
The Women team of Compound archery has bagged India’s 19th gold at the Asian Games. The team of Jyothi Surekha Vennam, Aditi Gopichand Swami and Parneet Kaur won the final against Chinese Taipei by a score of 230-229.
Archer Jyothi Surekha has won two gold medals within two days for the women’s team and mixed team of Compound archery. Now, she will aim for her third gold in the individual women Compound archery event.
Neeraj Chopra once again showed his true strength as he won a gold medal with a season-best 88.88m throw on Wednesday at Asian Games 2023. Chopra had won his Olympic gold with a 88.05m throw. Chopra is currently the reigning World Champion of Javelin as he won a gold in the World Athletics Championships in August with a throw of 88.17m.
Even though Neeraj Chopra won the gold, the surprise story of the event was Kishore Jena whose throw at one point went even farther than Chopra’s javelin throw in that round. Jena’s best throw came at his fourth chance when he registered a distance of 87.54m confirming a silver and India’s second medal at the Javelin event on his Asian Games debut.
HS Prannoy has reached the semi-final stage of Men’s singles badminton while also confirming a medal for India. Prannoy has created history as he becomes only the second Indian to win a medal in individual men’s badminton after Syed Modi who won a bronze in Asian Games 1982.
The Indian contingent has ended their Athletics campaign with 29 medals including 6 gold, 14 silver and 9 bronze medals. This is much better than the total of 20 medals in Asian Games 2018. India’s best athletics tally came in the inaugural edition of 1951 with a total of 34 medals.
Four Indian wrestlers - Antim Panghal, Pooja Gehlot, Naveen Malik and Mansi Ahlawat will play for the bronze medals in their respective categories.
India’s badminton queen PV Sindhu has surprisingly bowed out of the women’s singles category after losing to China’s He Bingjiao in the quarter final stage. Sindhu lost by a score of 16-21, 12-21.
Indian Squash player Saurav Ghosal will also look to win a historic gold in the Squash singles on Thursday afternoon. Ghosal defeated Hong Kong’s Henry Leiung in the semi-final to confirm at least a silver medal for India.
With two more gold medals on Day 12, India’s current medal tally has gone up to 84 including 21 gold, 31 silver and 32 bronze medals.