India won it's second medal of the London Olympics when shooter Vijay Kumar won the silver medal in the men's 25m rapid fire pistol shooting event.
Marksman Vijay Kumar has won the silver medal in the men's 25m rapid fire pistol shooting event.u00a0Cuban Leuris Pupo won the gold, while Chinese Feng Ding got the bronze.
The army sharp shooter fought a nerve-wracking battle with five other top marksmen and managed to beat the challenge of world champion Alexei Klimov of Russia, Chinese duo of Ding Feng and Zhang Jian and German Christian Reitz in the 40-shot final to finish runner-up.
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Pupo won the gold with a world record equalling score of 34.u00a0Pupo's calm approach helped Cuba win it's first gold of the 2012 Olympics.
The 26-year-old army subedar from Himachal Pradesh found the target 30 times out of 40 attempts in the series comprising eight rounds of five shots each.
This is India's second medal in the ongoing quadrennial extravaganza after fellow marksman Gagan Narang's bronze in the 10m Air Rifle event on July 30.
Vijay Kumar. File Pic
This was also the country's fourth medal in shooting in Olympic history. The other medal winners are Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (silver in 2004 Athens) , Abhinav Bindra (gold in 2008 Beijing) besides Narang.u00a0
Kumar started with a bang, hitting the target all five times and kept himself in the hunt for a medal by consistently finding the target. After a perfect five out of five at the start, Kumar, a double gold medallist in the 2010 Commonwealth Games, found the target four times in the second and third series, but missed it twice in the fourth. He came back strongly by finding the target four times in the next three rounds and assured himself of a silver.u00a0
In the last round after Pupo shot four to clinch the gold, Kumar seemed to tense up a bit and missed three targets. The bronze medal was won by Feng with a tally of 27. u00a0
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Kumar had earlier qualified for the final of the event byu00a0scoring 585. u00a0En route to the final, Kumar became the second shooter to break the previous Olympic record of 583 during the second stage of qualification.
Placed fourth in the list, Kumar, who had scored 293 in stage 1 of the qualification on Thursday, shot a series of 98, 97, 97 in the second stage to take his total score to 585.u00a0He shot a sequence of 99, 96, 98 at the Royal Artillery Barracks.
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