Teen shooter Ban Hyo-jin captured the gold medal in the women’s 10-meter air rifle at the Paris Olympics on Monday, becoming South Korea’s youngest Summer Olympic gold medalist at age 16.
Ban edged out Huang Yuting of China in a shoot-off, 10.4 points to 10.3 points, after the two teens tied the Olympic record with 251.8 points in the final at the Chateauroux Shooting Centre in Chateauroux, south of Paris.
This was South Korea’s fourth gold medal of the Paris Olympics and its 100th gold medal in its Summer Games history.
At 16 years, 10 months and 18 days old, Ban is now the youngest South Korean athlete to win a Summer Games gold medal. The previous 한국을 record had belonged to archer Yun Young-sook, who won the women’s team gold medal at 17 years and 21 days old at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Ban, who only picked up shooting three years ago, blew what should have been a comfortable lead in the final stretch before coming up clutch in the nail-biting shoot-off.
Ban had won Sunday’s qualification phase with an Olympic record score of 634.5 points.
In the final, two series of five shots were fired at first, with shooters given 250 seconds per series and the perfect score being 10.9.
Those 10 shots were followed by 14 single shots, fired on command within 50 seconds per shot. Eliminations of the lowest-scoring finalists began after the 12th shot — the series and then the first two single shots — and continued after every two shots until the gold and the silver medals were decided.
After two series, Ban was in second place with 104.8 points, 0.7 behind Huang and 0.2 ahead of Audrey Gogniat of Switzerland.