Prayers, dedication and rewards: How parents are rooting for their children with Olympic dream on the horizon

Manu Bhaker didn’t show any emotion on her face after shooting a disappointing 93 in her first series in the 10m air pistol event of the third Olympic selection trials.

Neither did her coach Jaspal Rana who watched from the spectators’ gallery of the Madhya Pradesh Shooting Academy in Bhopal, as she dropped to last place early in the contest.

Manu’s mother, Sumedha Bhaker, couldn’t deal with the stress though. “Mere se dekha nahi jayega. (I won’t be able to see this),” she muttered as she rushed out of the range.

She waited outside the range, mouthing prayers and scribbling furiously into a notebook and didn’t return until the end of the qualification round. By then, Manu had come through in first place with 577 points.

Sumedha wasn’t the only bundle of nerves at the selection trials in Bhopal. There were more, all invariably parents, following their children’s progress at the competition that will determine India’s team for Paris 2024 Olympics.

While Sumedha fled the venue(temporarily), others tried their best to hide their nerves. Sujit Sen, Tilottama Sen’s father, says he hid behind walls so that his daughter didn’t see him when she shot in the 10m air rifle event.

“I don’t want her to turn around and see me. If I show any worry on my face, it could end up disturbing her. So I usually just stay 180 degrees behind her so I don’t come into her peripheral vision,” he said.

Nevertheless, the parents have been going out of their way to ensure their children have the best possible system in place for the competition.

Asian Games champion and world record holder Sift Kaur Samra’s father Pawandeep Singh Samra drove 1200 kilometres, from Faridkot in Punjab, to drop her off at Bhopal rather than taking a flight or train.

Not only did he want Sift to be able to travel easily from her hotel in Bhopal to the shooting range, but he also wanted to avoid her going through the headache of travelling with firearms through the airport.

So was the case with Sachin Singh, the father of Esha Singh, who will be competing in the 25m pistol event at the Paris Games, who drove his SUV for 850 kilometres from Hyderabad to Bhopal, too.

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Not all parents were like that though. It was mostly the parents of younger girls who felt they had to be by their daughter’s side.

“Boys don’t seem to have the same kind of clingy parents. They seem to value their independence a lot more. I’ve seen a couple of parents come to competitions when their children were juniors but they stopped coming soon after. Girls generally seem to have more protective parents,” said Deepali Deshpande, former chief coach of the Indian shooting team.

Clingy or not, parents in Bhopal have taken their jobs seriously. Their roles seem to have continued after dropping their child off in Bhopal.

Sujit, who often has to take unpaid leave from his job as a software professional in Bengaluru, to travel with Tilottama, noted down every one of her scores and sent them to himself over WhatsApp.

Once he returned to his hotel room, Sen plotted out the scores on an Excel document, trying to find patterns in her performance.

In the evening, he sat with her and discussed amongst other things, the 9.7 in her third series that kept her already impressive 632.4 qualifying score from being even higher. He also doled out performance-based rewards.

“After every competition or training round, I usually motivate her by rewarding her for her good scores. For every 10.8 shot, I give her 20 rupees, and for every 10.9 shot, I give her 25 rupees. If she crosses 635 in qualification, it’s a bonus of 100 rupees,” Sen said.

While there could be an argument against parents being over-involved in their children’s careers, Sujit thought a balance had to be made.

“At the end of the day, when a coach is working with so many athletes, there’s no guarantee that they are going to be able to give their undivided attention to an athlete. This is more so for younger shooters who lack the maturity to know when they need to stand their ground against a coach,” Sujit said.

“At last year’s World Cup in Bhopal, Tilottama was told by a coach to tinker with her rifle in order to experiment with its settings. It proved to be a disaster but she couldn’t have said no to her coach. Sometimes you need a family member to be able to put their foot down. Tilottama is only 16 just now. Once she gets older, she will get more confidence to be able to make her own decisions. I’ll happily step away then,” he added.

That was the sort of role even Sift’s father Pawandeep saw himself fulfilling.

“There was no range in Faridkot when Sift started her career. I run a rice mill and had no knowledge of shooting. But because I had to travel with Sift whenever she trained and then whenever she travelled for a competition, I understood a fair amount myself. Now my role is to sometimes serve as an intermediary between Sift and her coaches,” he said.

Not all parents, who travelled to Bhopal, felt the need to be as involved with their children during the actual act of shooting.

“My job is just to be by Manu’s side. When it comes to shooting, what can I actually say that Jaspal sir doesn’t already know,” Sumedha said.

“Sometime back, I got some ayurvedic oil that I rubbed onto Manu’s fingers and knees. There’s so much stress in her joints when she shoots. I have found that it has really helped her.”

Sift’s mother Ramneek Kaur reflected the same emotion.

“My job is to simply keep Sift as relaxed as possible so that she is not stressed outside shooting. She has her own ideas about practice and techniques,” Ramneek explained.

“The two of us would usually watch films together in our hotel room. Over the last five days, we have watched Yodha, Heeramandi and Laapataa Ladies.”

While Sumedha always looked to give her daughter an edge, it wasn’t always this way. For most of her daughter’s career, Sumedha wouldn’t travel with her for competition.

As a principal of a private school in the village of Goria, Haryana, where Manu was born and raised, she felt her bigger responsibility was to the hundreds of children she was teaching.

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“Manu would often ask me to travel with her for competitions. But for a long time, I didn’t feel it would be right. How could I focus on my one daughter at the cost of the thousand girls I was the principal for,” she said.

She started accompanying her daughter once in a while, a few years back, before travelling full-time with her for at least domestic competitions now.

“After Manu moved her training base from Goria to Faridabad, it became harder for me to commute back and forth to the school. Eventually, I had to give it up,” she says.

Sumedha compared the stress of watching her daughter’s preparation and matches with awaiting the exam results of her students.

“Manu competed at her first (2018) Commonwealth Games when we had our class 12 board exams. The nervousness I felt for both was the same,” she says.

Although she was constantly by her daughter’s side now, Sumedha said she often wondered about returning to teaching.

“Maybe after Manu’s career, I’ll go back to teaching,” said Sumedha, who was planning to travel with her daughter to the Paris Games.

“I don’t yet know when I will go but I would like to be with Manu when she competes.”

Sujit had plans for Paris, too, but he wanted to do so keeping her daughter in the dark. “I want to watch but don’t want her to think I’m there. I will be booking a separate flight so she doesn’t even know I’m there,” he said.