I will never win everything, but I will never lose everything: Manu Bhaker

Manu Bhaker might be in the eighth year of an international career that’s seen her become one of India’s most accomplished shooting sportspersons, but even now there are firsts for her.

Five days ago, having previously won gold in Doha in 2019 and bronze in Shymkent in 2025, Manu failed to medal for the first time in the 10m air pistol event at the Asian Championships with a seventh-place finish in New Delhi.

On Monday, though, she shrugged off that disappointment with another first, her first-ever Asian Championships medal—a silver—in the 25m pistol event.

Manu had coasted through qualification with a score of 584 and then fought a tight final with Vietnam’s Thuy Trang Nguyen. The two had been locked at 35 shots, forcing a shoot-off, and when that was tied again, the contest went into another, where Manu was finally beaten after missing three targets to Nguyen’s two.

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At a different time in her career, Manu says she might have struggled to deal with the aftermath of defeat in the 10m pistol event earlier in the Asian Championships. But she’s wiser now.

“I think I now think about the bigger picture more. I think (when I lose a match) that it’s OK. That is in the past. Let me focus on the next thing at hand. The 10m pistol event was done and the next thing for me was the 25m match at the Asian Championships. I feel that after taking my lessons, of course, I was able to move on rather quickly. It’s just part of the cycle. I will never win everything, but at the same time, I will never lose everything as well. But as long as I’m working hard, I will try to keep giving my best,” she says.

Manu says she’s going to move on from this silver medal fairly quickly, too.

“Performance-wise, I would say it’s a little satisfactory. I have definitely taken lessons on what we have to work on, what we can improve and what we have to maintain. So, that is the goal now, to work on what we have learned,” she says.

Indeed, there are things Manu would want to learn from this competition. By her own lofty standards, she has underperformed in the 25m pistol event compared to the 10m air pistol. This silver medal is only the third ever individual senior international medal won by the 23-year-old in the 25m event, with the vast majority of her medals, including both her Olympic medals, coming in the 10m pistol event. 

The two events differ in terms of ammunition (pellets in the 10m pistol, .22 calibre rounds in the 25m pistol), gun shape and trigger weight, range and technique, and shooters often end up dropping one to specialise in the other. Manu, though, has shot in both events, often in the same tournament, since her international debut in 2018.

It’s not that Manu is weak in the 25m event or that she takes it less seriously (she’s currently second-ranked in terms of shooting average in both the 10m pistol and 25m pistol amongst Indian shooters and the only Indian shooter to be in the top six of both events).

Manu routinely posts high scores in qualification but has struggled to match those results in the finals. For instance, she posted a games record 593 on her Asian Games debut and subsequently finished sixth. At the 2024 Olympics, she was second-placed in qualification before finishing fourth in the finals.

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She acknowledges that she had trouble in the finals at New Delhi’s Asian Championships, too.

“In the finals, I was a little confused in the beginning, I would say. It got a little better in the middle, and the last one was a struggle again. I would say the grip pressure changed in the mid-series. So, we have to improve on that. But I would say that my finals have improved a little, I feel. And in the future, if I work on the lessons that I have learned, hopefully it will all improve,” she says.

She has been making changes in order to improve at the event. This year, Manu has been shooting with a new gun—an Italian Pardini pistol—in the 25m event. She has already shot with it on three separate occasions—the National Championships, the national selection trials and now the Asian Championships.

So far, Manu says she’s happy with her choice. “There is a difference in the accuracy and the recoil,” she says.

Right now, Manu says she’s still tweaking things and trying to get better. Although she has plenty of competitions left in the season, she’ll want to be in top shape towards the second half of the season, where she will look to perform at the Asian Games and the World Championships, neither of which she has an individual medal in.

For now, Manu says she’s discussing with her coach, Jaspal Rana, how to plan her season.

“When it comes to managing the season, I discuss these things with my coach, and we plan accordingly. We see what all competitions we have to shoot, what all competitions we can just let slip, where we need to peak and where we need to work even harder, push more, where we can just lie a little bit lower and just breathe and focus on ourselves,” she says.

And while the Asian Championships silver is a bonus, Manu says she can get a lot better in the 25m event. “I don’t think I’m peaking just now. I’m keeping things a bit moderate. I’m not at my peak, and I’m not ‘not working’ at all. I’m somewhere in between,” she says.

Published on Feb 09, 2026