Anantjeet Naruka and Parinaaz Dhaliwal win India’s first mixed team skeet medal at Asian Games 2026

India’s Anantjeet Singh Naruka and Parinaaz Dhaliwal won the bronze medal in the mixed team skeet event at the Asian Games 2026 in Nagoya, Japan on 2026-09-24, delivering India’s first-ever medal in this category; the result arrived a day after both shooters had claimed bronze medals with their respective men’s and women’s teams on Wednesday.

The pair finished third in the final with a total of 44, progressing through six series with scores of 7, 14, 21, 29, 36 and 44 across the contest.

China secured the gold with 52 points and South Korea took silver with 51 after a tense seventh series; South Korea had been level with India at 44 at one stage but India were awarded bronze on the basis of a better qualification-round ranking.

Naruka and Dhaliwal had earned the last available place in the final by finishing fourth in qualification with a combined score of 138; Qatar topped qualification on 145, followed by South Korea on 143 and China on 140, but Qatar fell to fourth place in the final.

Anantjeet Singh Naruka, 28, is from Jaipur and was introduced to the sport by his father, Dalpat Singh Naruka, who represented India as a skeet shooter; Naruka made his international debut in 2014 at the Asian Shotgun Championship in Al Ain, UAE, trains under his father and Italian coach Riccardo Filippelli, won a silver and a bronze at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, was part of India’s contingent at the Paris Olympics 2024, and won gold at the 2025 Asian Shotgun Championship in Shymkent.

Parinaaz Dhaliwal, 24, from Patiala, originally trained in trap before switching to skeet in 2015 at the New Moti Bagh Gun Club; her first international medal came in 2022 at the ISSF Junior World Cup in Suhl, Germany, and she also won a silver at the ISSF World Cup in New Delhi in 2021.

The mixed-team bronze took India’s shooting medal tally at the ongoing Games to eight — four silver and four bronze — and represents eight of India’s 15 medals in Aichi-Nagoya, keeping the country’s gold wait alive in the discipline.