It was intense competition in the men's skeet final of the National shotgun championship, but the non-functioning of the scoreboard and malfunctioning of the related equipment spoilt the show on Tuesday.
It was a heady climax when the competition spilt into the third day in bright sunshine, but the fun was lost before the penultimate station, as the targets kept emerging from the two houses continuously without any warning. To add to the confusion, the electronic scoreboard automatically counted the scores, adding two more points to all the five shooters!
Quite literally, the final range looked to be on auto-pilot. While the officials were able to fix the voice activated system, which triggers the flight of the clay-birds when called by the shooters, they did not bother to correct the scoreboard. While Allan Daniel Peoples was ahead, and confirmed his gold before the last station, the other four in the final had tied, but the score board was a mute witness, leaving the spectators to their own arithmetic.
Scoreboard problem
Worse, when the tie-break started between four shooters and went for a marathon session to decide the silver, the scoreboard had no role to play in the excitement.
Incidentally, the score-board had the names of the shooters only for the final, and there was no mention of even the back numbers of the shooters in most of the earlier rounds.
The score-board on the second range has stopped functioning, among the five ranges that are operational.
It will be a shame if the officials are not able to finish the double trap competition in a single day, as specified in the format. The challenge will be a lot harder in the trap competition, thanks to the high number of entries.
The Karni Singh range has been cleaned nicely, and that is the only consolation, as the world class equipment has been misbehaving.
