Asian Shooting Championships — India’s breakout star Suruchi targets consistency

Eighteen shots into the final of the 10m air pistol mixed team event at the Asian Shooting Championships on Thursday, the Indian coach Samresh Jang called for a timeout. Over the next thirty seconds Jang would try to motivate the two Indian shooters — Samrat Rana and Suruchi Phogat.

Although they had gone into the finals having topped the qualification round, they were trailing Uzbekistan’s Nigina Saidkulova and Mukhammad Kamalov by two points.

“Samresh sir told me I could do it. I’ve done it before,” Suruchi would say later.

A turnaround would not happen. Neither Suruchi nor Samrat would find any sort of consistency and the pair eventually finished with silver, scoring 479.6 to the Uzbek pair’s 481.3.

The Asian Championships have been an odd sort of tournament for Suruchi. She wasn’t even aware of the format change in the final of the mixed team event – she had assumed the gold medal match would be played between the top two teams from the qualification round.

She had to refocus on the firing line when she realised that the top four teams in qualification were all going to be shooting together. “I’d assumed it was just going to be two teams competing for the gold and that we’d win easily,” she says.

Suruchi and Samrat (L) finished second, scoring 479.6 to the Uzbeistan pair’s 481.3.
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That didn’t happen of course. The mixed team silver to a relatively unknown pair from Uzbekistan was preceded by a modest 576 in qualification and a fourth place in the final in the women’s individual event on Wednesday.

It’s not the result she would have wanted but Suruchi admits it’s one that will benefit her. “I didn’t have a good tournament here. I couldn’t perform the way I wanted to. But I’ve learned a lot from this. I’ll improve in my next competition,” she says.

There’s no denying she has the potential to. Over the past year, in her first international senior season, the 19-year-old has emerged as one of the breakout stars of Indian shooting. She stormed to gold at the National Games and then competed at three World Cups, winning individual gold in all of them.

But while she has proved to be an unstoppable force on her day, Suruchi’s had results that remind her that she’s not invincible. She could not make the final at either the Asian Championships or the World Championships last year. She also failed to finish on the podium at the National Championships.

But that poor run didn’t last. She concluded her 2025 season with gold in the women’s 10m pistol at the World Cup final with a World Record score in the final round. This year too she’s started well with scores of 580 and 587 in the first two selection trials for the national team.

Despite the ups and downs in her form, Suruchi remains confident about her ability. She’s also aware that she can’t take winning for granted. “Last year was really good for me. At the start of the year I was winning everything. But then I didn’t win a medal at the Worlds, or the Asian Championships and even the National Championships,” she admits.

These swings, she says, serve as a reminder that there’s more work to be done. With the next set of shooting trials to be held in March, followed by the first World Cup of the year in April, Suruchi has time to iron out the flaws she’s noticed in her technique.

“When everything is going well, my technique seems great but when I’m shooting up and down, that’s when I have to find out what’s going wrong. It’s part of shooting. I try to find out what we are doing. I write down everything I do in my diary and when I don’t remember what I’m doing, then I go through the diary,” she says.

But Suruchi says she’s determined to course correct quickly. “My expectations of myself increased after my performance last year. There are many major competitions this year, but every time I compete, I want to shoot well. Every time I compete, I want to win. That is why I feel that I have to work more on my technique. I’m going to find out why I wasn’t able to perform like I’ve done. I’ll fix it,” she says.

Published on Feb 05, 2026