India in Shooting, Paris 2024 Olympics review: Manu double and gut-wrenching near misses paint positive picture for future

If one can look beyond the many clichés in O Vencedor está Só, penned by Paulo Coelho in 2008, there exists a line that is likely to stay with you: “People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they still want more.”

The human heart is a funny place. It never stops yearning. There are moments when you may feel your heart is full. However, before the dust can settle, you will be chasing another canon event.

This eternal pursuit of happiness gives birth to dreams that could eventually make or break you. When Manu Bhaker became India’s first shooter and female athlete to strike gold at the Youth Olympic Games in 2018, the podium would have felt like home, where she belonged. As the euphoria began to subside, something inside her would have screamed in protest.

And thus started a long and arduous journey to reach the pinnacle of an Olympic sport — winning one of those hallowed discoid chunks of metal they call medals in the Summer Games.

Tokyo naturally became the first pit stop in 2020, later deferred to the following year after the coronavirus pandemic left the world in limbo. Manu and her mixed-team partner Saurabh Chaudhary entered the competition as favourites to win gold in their events, having displayed unwavering focus in ISSF (International Shooting Sport Federation) events preceding the Olympics. But in a shocking turn of events, the Indian contingent failed to win a single medal, let alone gold.

The shockwaves left behind in the wake of the disaster had telling effects. For starters, New Zealand cricketer Jimmy Neesham’s 2019 social media post saying, “Kids, don’t take up sport. Take up baking or something. Die at 60 really fat and happy,” went viral again. Then, Manu went into depression, Saurabh never got his form back, some shooters disappeared from the circuit, and one even went on a pilgrimage!

The Manu of yore, who once used to win medals for fun, took a lot of time to get the monkey off her back. It was 604 days later, to be precise, when she won her first ISSF World Cup medal since the Tokyo disaster.

Another significant milestone was breached three months later when Manu and her former coach Jaspal Rana, under whose tutelage she had bagged 10 senior World Cup medals and a Commonwealth Games gold, decided to bury the hatchet after having a public fallout in 2021.

The results were for all to see a year later when Manu topped the Olympic Selection Trials in both 10m air pistol and 25m sports pistol, thus making it impossible for selectors to ignore her in either category.

The 22-year-old made sure she repaid the faith with generous interest in Paris. On July 27, Manu’s dominant show in 10m air pistol qualification saw her become the first Indian woman to make an Olympic shooting final in 20 years. But aware that the job was only half done, Manu slipped out of the range quietly to focus on what was to follow the day after.

In the final, Manu picked up right from where she left. Not even once did she fall out of the top three places during the entire length of the competition. She eventually finished with 221.7 points and a bronze to hand India its first medal in the French capital.

Notably, she was only 0.1 points short of an assured silver medal! While that would have left many frustrated and disappointed, Manu had a big smile pasted on her lips when she waved to the crowd. She knew that the drought was finally over. It had taken India 12 years to bag a medal in the sport again after Vijay Kumar’s silver in the men’s 25m rapid fire pistol in London.

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On July 29, she was at it again, trying to make the top four in the 10m air pistol mixed team event with Sarabjot Singh. Although Sarabjot dropped 11 points in his three series, a 291 from Manu was enough to see the duo through to a bronze medal match against South Korea’s Oh Ye Jin, an Asian Championship gold medallist, and Asian Games silver medallist Lee Wonho.

Lee and Ye Jin ended up shooting a lot of 9s in the final contest to concede a 16-10 defeat.

This victory saw Sarabjot heave a sigh of relief, with the shooter having missed out on a place in the 10m air pistol final three days prior after he shot one ‘x’ less than eighth-placed Robin Walter of Germany. This means Walter had hit an extra bullet in the inner-10 ring, the diameter of which is merely 5 mm. To put matters into perspective, the diameter of the graphite tip of a new wooden pencil, before being sharpened, is roughly the same!

With two medals in her bag, Manu had already entered her name in the history books. She became Independent India’s first athlete to win two medals in a single edition of the Olympic Games. She also became only the second Indian female athlete to bag multiple Olympic medals after badminton sensation P.V. Sindhu.

Yet her undying passion for the sport would have told her she could push for the extra mile. Thus, with two of her events out of the way, Manu began preparations for the 25m sports pistol, which was still three days away.

On August 2, Manu proved difficult to catch as she raced away with the points in the Precision stage. By the time the curtains fell on the Rapid, Manu was second in the standings, with only Veronika Major of Hungary having bested her by equalling the Qualification Olympic Record (592).

Manu got off to a nervy start in the final, missing three of her first five shots on target. However, she bounced back to avoid getting eliminated until the eighth series, when she tied for third place with Major. The bronze-medal place eventually had to be decided via shoot-off, which saw Major register one extra hit (10.2-plus shots are considered hits) over Manu.

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For a while, Manu stood transfixed at her firing point, refusing to believe what had just transpired. When the audience broke the deathly silence, applauding her for the creditable fourth-place finish, she switched her weapon into safety mode and returned to the seating area a few metres away from where the eventual medal ceremony would take place. Ironically, though, Manu was only a few millimetres away from that podium.

She is not the only shooter, though, to have missed the podium by the barest of margins. Arjun Babuta put up a brave fight against the likes of four-time Worlds medallist and world record holder Sheng Lihao and 2023 world champion Victor Lindgren. Still, he ended up losing the bronze medal to Croatia’s Miran Maricic after giving in to the pressure and shooting a rare 9.5 off his final shot. Maricic was only 0.2 ahead of Babuta until the deciding shot was fired.

The curious case of the one missed target came back to haunt the Indian contingent once again, albeit this time in the shotgun arena. A surprise fourth-place finish from Anant Jeet Singh Naruka and Maheshwari Chauhan in the skeet mixed team qualification saw the duo lock horns with China in the bronze medal match. Jiang Yiting and Lyu Jianlin eventually won the contest 44-43, with the latter registering a perfect series!

Like shotgun, 50m rifle 3 positions is an event not many would want to hedge their bets on. No Indian had ever made the final of the said discipline in the Olympics. Who would have known that a ticket collector from the little-known village of Kambalwadi in Maharashtra would not only finally break the jinx but also go on to medal in the category?

Swapnil Kusale ensured India finished its shooting campaign at Chateauroux with the highest number of medals from a single edition of the Olympics, bagging a bronze in the smallbore event.

Although he just managed to make the cut at seventh place during qualifying, he consistently fired at the 10-ring in ‘Standing’ in the final to ensure another medal for the country.

India, which had failed to open its account in Tokyo 2020, finished 14th on the shooting medal tally. Going purely by count, India will take fifth place, having won one medal more than Great Britain, Guatemala and Switzerland.

China maintained its position from 2020, finishing top with 10 medals (five gold, two silver and three bronze). Meanwhile, South Korea (three gold, three silver) displaced the USA (one gold, three silver, one bronze) from the second spot.

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The present, to be sure, is a happy place to be in, and celebrations should be in order, but one cannot help but think about the sheer number of frustrating ‘what-could-have-beens’. While a number of Indian athletes are taking positive steps towards that one line beyond which glory awaits, the occasion tends to get big on a few who aren’t able to get over it.

What if Manu had that extra hit? What if Babuta had shot a high-10? What if Sarabjot had made the final in the individual event? What if one of Maheshwari and Naruka had missed one less clay pigeon?

The questions are never-ending, but it is good to have one’s sensibilities tickled for Los Angeles.