Paris Olympics: Manu Bhaker becomes first Indian to make final of 2024 Games but her job’s not done yet

At the conclusion of their competitions at the Olympics, athletes are required by official policy to walk through a gauntlet of railings and barricades – known as a mixed zone.

That’s where the media usually waits, hoping for an athlete to give a smart insight into their recently concluded performance. Athletes almost never do. Their emotions are too raw both in victory or defeat.

Neither Manu Bhaker nor Sarabjot Singh walked through the mixed zone following their qualification round of the women’s and men’s 10m air pistol qualification event at the shooting range at Chateauroux. Neither had to come by, they said more in their absence – for very different reasons.

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Manu had qualified for the finals of her event with a score of 580 points, finishing third out of 45 competitors – with the top-eight going through to play in Sunday’s final.

By dint of this, the 22-year-old became the first Indian to do so at the 2024 Olympics. At the end of her match, her coach Jaspal Rana was tearing up.

People were patting him on the back. But Manu wasn’t planning to soak in any praise just yet. She slipped out quietly, her sights focused on Sunday’s final.

Competing in her second Olympics, she had qualified for her first final in an individual event (she had also qualified in the 10m pistol mixed team event at the Tokyo Games). She was too invested in this opportunity to declare victory just yet.

Her coach Rana, never the most averse to a media quote, left the range quietly as well. “The final is a completely different day. Nothing has been won just yet,” was the only thing he said.

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If Manu’s silence was testament to her focusing on what lay ahead, Sarabjot’s quiet exit through the mixed zone was because he just couldn’t put behind what had just happened to him in the men’s 10m pistol event.

He finished with a total of 577 – the same as Walter Robin of Germany. It was the latter though who pipped him to eighth place – and the last qualification spot – by virtue of hitting more inner 10s – the innermost ring which is just half a centimetre across.

Where Sarabjot had shot 16, the German had shot 17. If the two had shot the same number, it would have been the Indian who would have gone through according to the rules, by virtue of having had the better final series (97 to 96).

After a brilliant fourth series, he was ranked third – all but assured of a place in the final. But a disastrous series of 8,9,9 in the penultimate series caused him to tumble down the ranking list and even a stirring fightback with 97 in the final series was not enough. It was a result even Robin wouldn’t believe.

“As a shooter, you can only really aim at the 10 ring – (which is 1.15 cm across). Hitting the inner 10 is almost a matter of luck,” Robin would say.

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It’s unlikely that blaming things on luck would relieve Sarabjot. “It’s going to be something he’s going to play in his mind again and again over the next few years. He’s going to remember just how close he got to the final of the Olympic Games,” coach Abhishek Rana would say.

Manu herself would leave little to chance. She had a blip in her shooting herself – hitting an ‘8’ score early in her penultimate series.

She steadied herself though. In her very next shot, she fired at the center of the target and then held her pose before lowering her pistol. Indian coach Munkhbayar Dorjusren was more than satisfied with her performance.

“The conditions in the hall were very hard for shooting. The air conditioning wasn’t working very well, which meant that shooters were finding it hard to grip the pistol properly. Despite that Manu did very well,” Dorjusren said.

While Manu will be focusing on her final, for every other Indian shooter in action on Saturday, the goal would be simply to put things behind and focus on their events ahead.

Sarabjot, Angad Cheema (who was ranked third at one time in the men’s 10m pistol event before finishing 18th with a score of 574) and Rhythm Sangwan (who finished 15th in the women’s event with a total of 573) will have to look ahead to the mixed team event.

The same will hold true for India’s 10m air rifle shooters Arjun Babuta, Sandeep Singh, Ramita Jindal and Elavenil Valarivan, all of whom failed to qualify for the medal rounds of the mixed team events.

While Valarivan and Sandeep finished 12th out of 28 participants with a score of 626.3, Babuta and Jindal finished sixth with a total of 628.7.

“We will have to return to thinking about our process of shooting. The competition has just started. We still have a long way to go,” Babuta said.