The lineup for the mixed 10-meter air rifle event, an event that is expected to bring South Korea its first medal at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, has been announced.
The Korea Shooting Federation announced on Friday (local time) that Park Ha-joon (KT) and Ban Ban-hyun (Gyeonggi Provincial Office) will be paired together, while Choi Moo-hyun (Kyungnam University) will team up with Ban Hyo-jin (Daegu Chego).
The mixed 10-meter air rifle event at the Paris Olympics will begin at 9 a.m. local time on Sunday, the day after the opening ceremony, at the Chateauroux Shooting Center in France, with the main event followed by the medal finals.
This is the first event in which medals will be decided due to time constraints.
Initially, the Korean shooting team prepared for the competition by selecting Ban Hyo-jin to pair with men’s rifle ace Park Ha-joon.
Park has both the skill and experience to win a bronze medal in this event at last year’s Hangzhou Asian Games, teaming up with Lee Eun-seo (Seosan City).
Ban Hyo-jin, now a high school sophomore, is the youngest member of the Korean team (17) and has been touted as a candidate to follow in the footsteps of Yeo Gap-soon, the women’s shooting gold medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
The shooting team switched Park’s partner from Ban Hyo-jin to the more experienced Ban, as another female rifle shooter, Ban Ban-hyun, is in better shape now that she has arrived in the country and the mixed event requires a lot of shots in a short period of time.
South Korea had initially secured only one ticket for the 10-meter air rifle mixed event.
The International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) announced the finalized quotas for the Paris Olympics on its website on Nov. 16, and South Korea succeeded in securing a second spot in the mixed rifle event, which had been unclear.
If Ban Hyo-jin holds the title of ‘youngest athlete’, Ban Ban-hyun is the ‘mom athlete’.
Ban won the women’s 10-meter gold medal at the Baku Shooting World Cup in May, then competed at the Cairo World Cup in October 2022 while pregnant and earned a quota spot for the Paris Olympics.
With a one-year-old daughter in South Korea, Ban will be competing in her first Olympic Games, and her goal is to win a medal and have a second child.
The sport was introduced at the Tokyo 2020 Games.
At that time, Nam Tae-yoon and Kwon Kwon-ji competed as a pair, finishing fourth in the bronze medal match, just missing out on a medal.
In the mixed 10-meter air rifle event, men and women shoot 30 shots each over 30 minutes in the first round of the main competition, with the eight teams with the highest combined scores advancing to the second round.
The maximum score for a single shot is 10.9 points, so the combined score for men and women is 654 points after 60 shots.
In the second round, men and women shoot 20 rounds each over 20 minutes to determine the top four teams.
The first and second place teams will advance to the gold medal match, while the third and fourth place teams will compete for the bronze medal.
The medal finals are timed at 50 seconds per shot. After each male and female athlete fires one shot, the scores are totaled, with the higher team taking home two points and the lower team receiving zero. Ties are broken by one point.
The first team to reach 16 points is the winner, and the second team to reach 16 points is the winner. 토토사이트 추천