Cyprus on a roll with five medals in three days in Glasgow

By Andreas Vou

GEORGIOS Achilleos has won gold for Cyprus in the men’s skeet shooting, taking Cyprus’ medal count in the opening three days of the Commonwealth Games to five.

Achilleos was the favourite going into the event and the former world champion showed his superiority, earning the top prize with four clays to spare.

The 33-year-old’s gold comes less than 24 hours after Dimitris Minasidis earned Cyprus its first gold medal in weightlifting.
The 25-year-old beat off all competition in the 62 kg class. A total lift of 276 kg was enough to secure gold for Minasidis who saw off the challenge of Sri Lanka’a Sudesh Peiris, who lifted 273 kg, while Samoa’s Vaipava Ioane took the bronze.

Meanwhile, Themida Christodoulidou won the bronze medal in the individual rhythmic gymnastics competition on Saturday while fellow Cypriot Pantelitsa Theodoulou narrowly missed out on a medal, finishing in fourth place.
On Thursday, 23-year-old Andreas Krassas won a silver medal in the under-66 kg judo class, winning four consecutive matches before eventually losing out in the final against world number seven Colin Oates.

The silver medal won by Krassas makes it just the second that Cyprus has won in judo in the history of the 20 Commonwealth Games, after Christos Christodoulides’ silver in 2002 in Manchester.
Another success for judo followed shortly after, as Robert Nicola finished in fifth place in the 81 kg category with two wins and two defeats.
Nicola overcame the challenge of his first opponent, Kenya’s Joshuah Omondi, with ease but England’s Tom Reid proved too tough an opponent for the Cypriot, meaning that he just missed out on a medal.

Nicola later spoke of his frustration at narrowly missing out on the podium, feeling that he could have beaten Reid but rued making a solitary error which ended up proving costly.

“I could have beaten the Englishman. I made one mistake, but that’s Judo,” he said after the match.

Elsewehre, Andri Eleftheriou, competing in the women’s skeet shooting, entered the semi-final with a ranking of 69/75, the second best out of the other five competitors. The 30-year-old went on to win the bronze medal, beating England’s Sarah Gray in the shoot-off with 13 out of 16 shots compared to her rival’s 12/16.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.