This July 2, 2024, file photo shows South Korean rifle shooters Park Ha-jun (L) and Ban Hyo-jin after the South Korean national shooting team’s launch ceremony for the Paris Olympics in Seoul. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
PARIS, Jul. 25 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea made a last-minute switch to its mixed rifle shooting teams on Thursday, two days before their competition in France.
The Korea Shooting Federation (KSF) announced that Park Ha-jun, a three-time Asian Games medalist, will team up with Keum Ji-hyeon in the 10-meter air rifle mixed team event. Ban Hyo-jin, Park’s former partner, will shoot alongside Choe Dae-han instead.
The qualification for the mixed team event will begin at 9 a.m. Saturday, the first day of the medal race after the opening ceremony, at the National Shooting Center in Chateauroux, about 270 kilometers south of Paris. The bronze medal match will follow at 10:30 a.m., to be immediately followed by the final.
This could be South Korea’s first medal event of the Paris Olympics.
Park and Ban had been partners in the leadup to the Olympics, but the KSF shuffled the deck with Keum outperforming Ban in training after the team had arrived in France.
Keum, 24, won an International Shooting Sports Federation World Cup title in May and has far more international experience than Ban, a 16-year-old who only picked up shooting in 2021.
The KSF will also bank on Park’s experience in the mixed team event. He won the bronze medal there at last year’s Asian Games next to a different partner, Lee Eun-seo.
In the mixed team event, each shooter will fire 30 shots in 30 minutes in the first qualification stage. The maximum score is 654, and the top eight teams will advance to the next phase.
In the second stage, shooters will each take 20 shots in 20 minutes. Teams ranked third and fourth will compete in the bronze medal match, and the top two teams will clash in the gold medal match.
In those medal matches, shooters will fire single shots on command within a 50-second limit. Two shooters’ combined score will be their team’s score. The team with the higher score after each shot will earn two points, and a tie results in one point. The first team to reach 16 points wins.
The 10m air rifle mixed team event made its first Olympic appearance in Tokyo three years ago. Nam Tae-yun and Kwon Eun-ji lost in the bronze medal match then.
(Yonhap)
