HANOI: After his disappointing performance in the Philippines in 2019, national shooter Johnathan Wong returned to the SEA Games with a vengeance to wrest the gold medal in the final of the men’s 10m air pistol event today.
Competing at the National Sports Training Centre, a calm and focused Johnathan, who won gold in the event at the 2017 edition in Kuala Lumpur, weathered the pressure of having to deal with the home crowd’s boisterous support to win with an overall score of 238.6 points.
Everything seemed to go right for the 29-year-old as his sharpshooting could not be matched by closest rivals, Vietnam’s Cuong Tran Quoc who took the silver with 236.6 points and Iqbal Raia Prabowo of Indonesia who settled for the bronze after scoring 214.2 points.
With his victory, Johnathan buried the ghost of 2019, when he failed to defend his gold after only managing a fourth-place finish.
The gold is the first for the Malaysian shooting squad in Hanoi.