Qatar’s pairing of Rashid Saleh al-Athba and Reem al-Sharshani came from four shots down just after the halfway point in their skeet mixed team final against France to win gold at ISSF World Cup in Cairo.
When al-Athba missed his first shot in the fourth of the six rounds the gap between his team and the French pairing of Eric Delaunay and Lucie Anastassiou, who had both shot maximums on their previous round, began to look unbridgeable.
But then a sudden drop in form by the latter shooter in her penultimate round, when she missed all five clays, tipped the contest towards the Qatari pairing, who went into the final round with a one shot lead in a competition taking part in unpredictable winds.
With all but al-Athba missing one target in the final round of an event that will feature for the first time at the Paris 2024 Olympics it meant that Qatar eventually took gold 38-36.
For the 31-year-old Anastassiou, who had suffered a similar dip in the women’s skeet final which dropped her out of a bronze medal position that was eventually filled by al-Sharshani, this was another bittersweet day.
Al-Sharshani, who was fifth at last month’s Asian Championships in Kuwait, earned her first individual World Cup medal.