Sejal Kamble settled it with her final shot. A 10.5, clean and unhurried, closing a junior women's 10 m air pistol final she had already turned in her favour. Sejal Kamble finished with 240.2 points to take gold at the ISSF Junior World Championships in Suhl, Germany, on 18 June 2026.
The margin told the story of control. Kamble finished 4.4 points clear of Bulgaria's Maria Encheva Atanasova, who took silver on 235.8. India claimed a double podium, with Himanshi third on 217.6.
How the final was decided
The morning qualification, across a field of 89 shooters, gave little sense of what would follow. Himanshi led the Indian effort in third with 574, while Kamble sat fourth on 573 and Vanshika fifth on 572. Three Indians into the final. One ranked below both her compatriots at that stage.
Then the order changed. As the early leaders felt the pressure of the elimination rounds, Kamble grew steadier with each shot, reeling in the front and pulling away from it. A tight contest became a comfortable one. Behind her, the fight for silver went to the wire: Himanshi was level with Atanasova after the sixth elimination round and lost the shoot-off, settling for bronze. Vanshika finished fourth on 191.3, just outside the medals. Kamble, by then, was beyond reach, her closing 10.5 confirming the title rather than winning it.
The composure is not incidental. As a trainee of the Army Marksmanship Unit, Kamble has built the routine and the low pulse that hold under the strain of knockout shooting. The Reliance Foundation has supported that discipline with sports science, nutrition and psychological conditioning. The result in Suhl was the visible edge of that groundwork.
A step in the trajectory
This gold arrives at a rise already in motion. Two months earlier, at the ISSF Junior World Cup in Cairo, Kamble had topped 25 m pistol qualification with 580 and taken individual silver — a different event, with a different rhythm and a different kind of nerve. Moving between the rapid, coordinated demands of the 25 m and the fine, repeated control of the 10 m air pistol asks for two separate temperaments. At eighteen, she has shown both.
The Suhl medal folds into a wider Indian effort in Germany, where Kamble also formed part of the team gold in the discipline alongside Vanshika Chaudhary, Navya and Sanskriti Bana. But the individual title stands on its own. It marks the point where a promising junior became a world champion in her category, on a range far from home, against the best of her age.
One shot at the end. Nothing left to prove that day.
