India's Asian Games Medal Count Climbs to Three, Still Waiting on Gold

Rudrankksh Patil, Himanshu Dhillon and Parth Mane shot a combined 1890.1 in the men's 10m air rifle team event at the Aichi Prefectural General Shooting Gallery. Good for silver. Not quite good enough for gold, because China put up 1899.0, a new world record, and there was no catching that. Korea took bronze with 1841.4.

Patil, still just 22 and already a former world champion, finished third in qualification with 631.8. Dhillon shot 630.0 for seventh. Mane was eleventh on 628.3. Both Patil and Dhillon made the individual final too, which meant India had two more cracks at a medal from the same range before the morning was out.

Sound familiar? It should. A day earlier it was the women doing more or less the same thing. Elavenil Valarivan, Sonam Maskar and Vidarsa K Vinod won silver in the women's 10m air rifle team event, edged out by the hosts. Elavenil then turned around and won an individual silver too, the first Indian woman to manage that in this event at an Asian Games.

So that's the scorecard so far. Two silvers Sunday, one more Monday. India walked into these Games off the back of a record 107 medals at Hangzhou three years ago, 28 of them gold. A gold-less start two days in isn't exactly cause for alarm, but it is the kind of thing that gets noticed back home, fairly or not.

There was better news of a different kind from the cricket. Shafali Verma smashed a century to help the defending champion women's team into the final against Sri Lanka, which means India is assured of at least silver before the final has even been played.

Hockey had a good couple of days as well. The women beat Uzbekistan 19-0 on Sunday and came back out against Indonesia on Monday looking to keep that run going. The men, also defending champions, opened with a 13-1 win over Indonesia of their own.

There's always something extra when India plays Pakistan in table tennis, and this time the women delivered a clean sweep, winning all three group matches to finish top of Group F and march into the quarterfinals. Sutirtha Mukherjee got the tie started with a straight-games win over Aleena Khan. Then it was debutant Syndrela Das, who beat Kalsoom Khan just as comfortably. Sreeja Akula closed it out. The men had their own tie against Pakistan later on Monday.

Both Indian kabaddi teams are defending champions, and both got their campaigns started on Monday at the Tokai Citizen Gymnasium. The men opened against hosts Japan in Group A. The women faced Bangladesh at the same venue a little later. Nobody expects either team to lose the title without a fight, but the pressure of walking in as champions is its own kind of test.

Lakshya Sen, HS Prannoy, Kidambi Srikanth and the doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty led the men's badminton team out against Bangladesh on Monday. The women had already set the tone a day earlier, beating Kazakhstan 3-0 without dropping a single game.

India's boxing campaign also got underway, with Sumit Kundu facing Thailand's Bunjong Sinsiri in the men's 70kg round of 32.

But if there's one story worth following closely from these two days, it's Suchika Tariyal's. MMA is brand new to the Asian Games, and the 36-year-old, a former judoka who only switched sports a few years back, has already guaranteed India a medal by reaching the women's traditional 60kg semifinal. She takes on Singapore's Teo Hui Hoon next for a place in the final. Elsewhere, wushu exponent Roshibina Devi began her own hunt for a third straight Asian Games medal in the women's 60kg sanda category.

Two days down. Plenty more to come, and India still hasn't found that first gold.