Paris 2024: From training overload injury to Olympic medal – Sarabjot Singh’s redemption arc comes full circle in Chateauroux

There’s something endearing about speaking to Sarabjot Singh minutes after he partnered Manu Bhaker to win a bronze medal in the 10m air pistol mixed team event. The win hasn’t really sunk in, and he has no idea how his life is about to change.

For now, his mind is still in the Olympic shooting Center in the provincial French town of Chateauroux, some 300 kilometres from Paris and a world away from his old life in India.

He’s not sure if his friend ‘Poppy’ – the one who loves to modify cars – will come to pick him up at the airport.

“Sometimes, my friends say they’ll pick me up but at other times they don’t confirm,” he says.

Sarabjot’s friends are car nuts like him. Unlike so many athletes competing here, he never changed his phone’s wallpaper to align with his Olympic goals. The picture is not of the rings or a medal from Paris like many of his colleagues. It is of his dream car – a BMW M2. As the riches that accrue to an Olympic medallist in India promise to flood his way, there’s little doubt about his future drive.

But not all memories from this medieval French town are pleasant for Sarabjot. A few days back, he missed out on a spot in the final of the 10m men’s air pistol event by the thinnest margin. A year ago, he never made it to Chateauroux – failing to make the Indian team that had come to practise here as part of an Olympic preparatory camp.

He had lost out after dealing with one of the symptoms associated with overzealous young athletes – injuries caused by training overload. “I’d just competed at the Bhopal World Cup where I’d won a gold medal. Then when I woke up after it, I found I couldn’t move my shooting arm,” he recalls.

It took months of therapy to treat the ailment. “I couldn’t even lift a pistol at the start. When I started shooting again, I’d make five shots then ice my arm before I could continue,” he says. Recovery was slow, painful and not guaranteed. He would eventually compete at the Asian Games, where he finished fourth and then the Asian Olympic qualifiers where he won a quota for the Paris Games – with a still-healing arm. “I was in pain constantly,” he admits.

They were, he says, the hardest days of his life. Talented as he was – as a 17-year-old he had won gold at the Junior World Championships – no one could have faulted him for being dejected by the effort.

For many in his small village of Dhindsa some 40 kilometres from Haryana’s Ambala, the goal is very different. “All of my family is outside the country. My uncles and aunts are abroad. My grandparents are abroad. Even my younger brother is studying in Canada,” he says

Sarabjot, though, never wanted to leave. “The rest of my family is here. I always wanted to stay in India. I wanted to do something for the country,” he says.

That something was always going to be shooting – a sport he took up as a 14-year-old. Sarabjot’s father, Jatinder Singh, a farmer, believed in him, raising money to buy a pistol through loans. Training wasn’t always easy. The academy run by former shooter turned coach Abhishek Rana, where he trained in Ambala, was a good 40-minute journey from his home.

It was a journey he made every day without fail. “Sarabjot was my first student. He’s also my most dedicated one. There was never a time where he’d turn up late for training, even if it meant travelling by bus and being pushed and shoved the whole way,” he says.

Sarabjot remembers those days well. “I didn’t enjoy it,” he admits honestly. “For the first four years that I did it, I didn’t enjoy it. I was very grateful when my father finally got a car and I could drive to training,” he says.

Even later when results started to come in – Junior World gold in 2019, then Asian team gold in 2023 – things didn’t change immediately. That was the way his coach wanted it too.

“He bought a Scorpio with the money, but I made sure that he gave that car to his father. I made him drive his father’s old Swift D’zire instead. I wanted him to maintain the hunger to succeed,” says Rana.

That hunger has now been sated, if only partially, at Chateauroux. For Sarabjot, this is a magical journey that’s just begun. “This is just the start for me. I’ll do even better at Los Angeles 2028,” he says.