Paris 2024: Manu Bhaker leaves Olympics with ‘mark of a champion’ after 25m pistol heartbreak

All sportspersons carry some sort of reminder of their choice of profession. Wrestlers have cauliflower ears, judokas twisted knuckles, and weightlifters grazed shins. Manu Bhaker has her own memento as well. There’s a pressure sore around her thumb and forefinger and an angry red bunion at the base of her palm, around where she grips the wooden stock of her Pardini pistol. Her weapon’s hilt is custom-shaped, designed as much as possible to follow the curve of her palm.

There’s only so much it can do. Each time she fires a .22-inch caliber brass bullet, 1.4 kilos of wood and iron kick back and bite into her flesh. The 22-year-old is conscious of the blemish on her hand. “It’s not something I can get rid of. I’ve tried to treat it with creams, but it’s never going to disappear as long as I shoot. It will always be there,” she admitted.

The battle scars will last as long as she shoots. What will stay even after that are the two Olympic bronze medals Manu will return to India with. She’s already journeyed far into legend at this point. And she very nearly went even further. Competing in the final of the women’s 25m pistol event on Saturday, she finished fourth, by the barest of margins, losing a four-shots-to-three shootout to the reigning world champion Veronika Major of Hungary.

For most of the competition, she was right there fighting not just to stay in the competition but often sometimes, for the lead. She was in third place after the fifth series of five shots, and in second, just one behind the leader and eventual winner Jiin Yang of Korea after the sixth and seventh. A weak eighth series saw Major force a shoot-off and a missed fourth shot ended up seeing the Indian eliminated by a single point.

The result was almost an anticlimax for the dozens of Indian journalists and fans who had made the 250km journey from Paris to this provincial French town of Châteauroux in the wee hours of the weekend. They had done so for no other reason but the certainty that a 22-year-old girl, who had already made so much history, was going to make more of it. For the first time, Manu returned from the finals range in Chateauroux without a medal around her neck. After her event, she returned to her chair placed, next to the firing line for eliminated shooters. She almost seemed quizzical at what had just happened.

Manu teared up at that moment, and Coach Munkhbayar Dorjsuren, who was sitting behind her, reached out with a comforting hug. The moment was still raw, but after a few minutes to process her emotions, Manu began to view her fourth place for what it was: a solid result in an almost perfect tournament.

“Fourth position definitely doesn’t feel amazing, but there’s always a next time,” Manu said after the match. “I have two medals and plenty of motivation to prepare for the next opportunity. I will do my best and work really hard to achieve a better finish for India next time.”

Jaspal Rana, the coach whose partnership with Manu, has yielded such remarkable results, remarked that the tournament couldn’t have gone much better. “Two medals are incredible. A third would have been a miracle,” Rana said later.

Although Jaspal is rarely easily pleased, he admitted to some satisfaction after the match. For once, his face was not set in its usual scowl but was relaxed with a genuine smile. For all the recriminations a fourth-place finish usually draws in India, it has to be said that Manu’s performance was near flawless.

“It was perfect. Her lifts (when shooters pick up the gun on the signal and bring it down to the target) were perfect. Her time to shoot (shooters have 3 seconds to take each shot in a series of 5) was exactly what we have been practising for the last 13 months that we have been training together,” Jaspal said.

Even Manu’s competitors took note of her prowess. “Air pistol and sport pistol are, of course, different. For an air pistol, you don’t want to see too much movement in the gun, and you want to see some follow-through than when you shoot a sport pistol. But at the end of the day, when it comes to pistol shooting, it all comes down to consistency. When I saw the Indian shooter, I could tell that she was someone who had control of what she was doing. There were no moments where she broke emotion-wise or through inconsistency,” said USA pistol coach Jason Turner.

But while pistol might be a sport of consistency, it is also one of fine margins. In contrast to events like the 10m air pistol, where scores are counted to the decimal point and then totalled, sport shooters can only hit (score above a 10.2) or miss (score anything outside it). A bad score in air pistol might be devastating, but it’s not insurmountable in the women’s 25m pistol.

The Korean shooter, who eventually won gold in the event, fired three shots that only managed to hit the frame of the target. A single shot like that would have all but eliminated her from the competition then. In the 25m pistol event, all it registered was a no-hit—just the same as a score of 10.1.

“Even though Manu didn’t get that medal, I am happy that she was much better than her. She handled her pressure as well as she could have. And if it didn’t work out for her this time, it will work out eventually, and that’s what matters because this is not the end for Manu,” Jaspal said.

There’s no great mystery about this consistency, he added. “The fact that Manu performed as well as she did—the way she lifts so cleanly, the way she follows through her shots— The way she kept her composure. She couldn’t have done it without the six hours of training we did each day. She has the proof of her effort in her mark on her hands. That is the hand of a shooter,” Jaspal said.

He promises Manu’s hand will carry the same marks for a long time to come. “There’s nothing good about missing a medal, but it keeps her hunger alive for Los Angeles 2028.”