Sarabjot Singh couldn’t believe his luck on the biggest day of his blossoming shooting career. On Olympic debut at the Paris Games on Saturday, he huffed and puffed during the 10m air pistol qualification, stumbled, but got back on his feet like a boxer before the count of 10, throwing a punch back like he knows best — with all 10s to post 100 in one of the six series.
It brought Sarabjot to the edge of top eight — the bracket in the air pistol qualification round that ensures a shooter a place in the final.He started with an uncharacteristic 94, then rose to register 97, hung in with a 96 next and then the 100 to remind his opponents that he still hasn’t lost control over his trigger.
But a 93 in the fifth series was like a knockout blow. Still, the 22-year-old double World Cup gold medallist from Ambala didn’t throw in the towel, unlike his mate Arjun Singh Cheema firing a few lanes away from him and resigned to his fate. He finished 18th with a score of 574.

Sarabjot ended with a 97 in his sixth and last series to finish with 577. The chart showed him ninth but with the same total as Germany’s Robin Walter, with difference in one little number mentioned alongside their respective scores — Sarabjot’s 16x versus Walter’s 17x — which put the Indian out of the group of top 8 who will play the final on Sunday.
Here’s an explainer what ‘X’ in shooting means:
An ‘X’ denoted against a shooter’s score in an air pistol match means an inner-10 scored by the shooter. Talking in the context of today’s qualification round in Paris, Sarabjot hit 16 inner 10s in his 577, whereas Walter hit 17.
When two shooters end up with the same score and the tie needs to be broken to decide the final standing, then the officials first look at the number of inner-10s. If that also remains the same, then whoever scored the most points in the last series finishes higher. And when even that can’t decide, then the scores in the fifth series are checked, and it keeps moving to the preceding series until the tie is broken.
What’s the measurement that decides whether a shot is an inner 10 or not?
The 10 ring in the 10m air pistol target measures 11.5mm, and if the shooter hits 5mm or more inside that ring, the electronically-managed target counts it as an X or inner-10.
Here’s a graphical description as shown in the ISSF rule book:

What is a series in a 10m air pistol shooting match?
In the qualification round of an air pistol match, every shooter has to shoot 60 shots and can score from 0 to 10 on each shot. The 60 shots are divided into six series, which means every 10 legal shots fired constitute one series.
At the end of the match, scores of each of the six series are added to arrive at a cumulative total that separates the shooters and decides the top eight finishers who go on to play the final.