Vietnamese rejoice at first Olympic gold

Vietnam’s gold medallist Hoang Xuan Vinh poses on the podium during the medal ceremony for the men’s 10m air pistol shooting event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at the Olympic Shooting Centre in Rio de Janeiro on August 6, 2016. AFP

Vietnamese rejoiced Sunday after their country won its first ever Olympic gold medal, a victory made all the more sweeter by the fact that regional rival China was beaten along the way.

Hoang Xuan Vinh, a 41-year-old a serving army colonel who first learned to shoot with AK47 rifles, made history in Rio overnight when a near-perfect final shot in the men’s 10-meter air pistol clinched him gold.

Vietnamese state media reported that Vinh would receive $100,000 from the state on his return — a handsome sum in a country where the average annual income is around $2,100.

Vinh’s victory shunted Brazil’s Felipe Almeida Wu and China’s Pang Wei into second and third respectively, something that was seized on by jubilant Vietnamese.

“So proud! But the greatest happiness was that we won over China,” Nguyen Cao Ky Duyen, a Vietnamese music show host based in the US but popular in her homeland, wrote on Facebook./rga