National Games: Rahi Sarnobat draws lessons from health battles to keep Olympic ambitions burning

Two years after a mysterious nerve condition all but ended her shooting career, Asian Games champion Rahi Sarnobat is back and ready for more.

In the final series of five shots in the final of the women’s 25m air pistol competition at the National Games in Dehradun, Simranpreet Kaur might have thought she had it. For much of the final, she had been in second place but with the leader Rahi in her sights. With one final series of five shots to go, Simranpreet was still one point behind. However in the final series, she seemed to be closing in on her first National Games gold.

As Rahi missed her first shot and Simranpreet hit hers, the scores were level. The momentum seemed to be with the shooter from Punjab.

A switch flipped in Rahi at this point. When it mattered most, she gritted down and hit every target in her remaining four shots. Simranpreet, on the other hand, missed one. Eventually, the gold medal fell around the neck of the Maharashtrian.

“Just a bit of experience,” Rahi would explain with a smile the difference between the two later. At 34 years of age, Rahi does sport a few streaks of grey in her hair. She was the oldest on the starting line of the final and one of the senior-most shooters in the country. She’s been shooting for nearly twenty years now, nearly as long as Simranpreet has even been alive.

Rahi doesn’t make much of the gold medal though. When you have been around as long as she has, she admits the matches bleed into each other. This medal might soon be forgotten, she admits. “I actually won gold in the 2022 National Games. And when I was thinking about it the other day, I couldn’t even remember at first where it was (They were held in Gujarat),” she laughs.

What matters for Rahi, in her own words, is that she is still shooting competitively at a very high level.

“When I started shooting in 2006, I wasn’t thinking of scores or medals. I was just thinking I had to do this for a very long time. I didn’t want to be one who left the sport after four years.”

She has faced and overcome her share of obstacles. In 2014 she suffered a freak hairline fracture in the elbow of her shooting arm that took seven months to recover from and many more to begin shooting. She made her comeback from there, going on to win gold in the 2018 Asian Games and compete in her second Olympics in Tokyo in 2021. In the start of 2022, with Manu Bhaker still struggling to recover from her disappointment in Tokyo, it was Rahi, who was the top-ranked shooter in the country.

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Biggest challenge

That was when she faced her most serious challenge– one that made her doubt whether she would ever shoot again.

“I was at the top of my game having won the selection trials to pick the Indian team for the 2022 World Championships and the two subsequent World Cups. I was just about to leave my home in Pune to join the national team in Delhi from where we were going to fly to Egypt. I was at the door of my house when my heartbeat suddenly shot up dramatically. I had hot flashes and I felt this strange tingling sensation followed by intense pain. I thought I was going to die. I had to be rushed to the hospital. When I got an ECG done, there was nothing wrong with my heart,” she says.

At first there seemed to be no real answer to the cause of her ailment and what it even was. Eventually it was diagnosed as a case of neuropathic pain – a type of pain that occurs when the nervous system is damaged or malfunctioning.

There’s no real treatment for the condition.

“For the first six months, there was very little idea or pattern of illness. I lost all my strength. I felt one leg became very heavy and one leg became very light. Sometimes you don’t feel like you can control your movement. There was a moment where I lost control of my right leg. Any part of my body would start to hurt on its own. My gums and even my eyelashes would experience intense pain. And because it was so unusual no one could understand me except my neurologist. There is no medication or treatment for it. You just have to work around the symptoms. For a long time, I was just on sleep medication. I was sleeping for 16 hours a day on some days when things were very bad.”

Although she says it isn’t conclusive, Rahi says her neurologist suspected the condition to be caused by the two bouts of COVID she suffered during the pandemic. She also feels the stress of shooting might have triggered or aggravated it.

Shooting though wasn’t a possibility during those days. “It wasn’t a case where I thought I wanted to quit shooting. I physically couldn’t do it anymore. At that time I was simply wondering whether I’d be able to live a physically independent life again,” she says.

Slow comeback

Rahi says it took nearly half a year for her symptoms to start to fade. She feels lucky.

“There are some cases where the pain goes on for up to a decade. I sometimes think that perhaps I was so motivated to return to shooting and perhaps that made my recovery faster,” she says.

Her comeback was equally slow.

“I went to the range seven months after my first symptoms. I had no strength and I could barely lift the gun for three minutes. But slowly I increased that to five minutes, then 10 and eventually half an hour.”

While she did eventually start shooting competitively again in late 2023, Rahi had been overtaken by multiple younger competitors. Although she attempted to qualify for the selection trials to make the Indian team for the 2024 Olympics, she wouldn’t make the cut.

“That period of my life hurt a lot. I couldn’t defend my title at the Asian Games. I stopped following shooting while I was unable to shoot. But there’s nothing you can do. What use would crying do? Sometimes, you just have to take what is happening to you.”

Over the course of 2024, Rahi has been slowly trying to return to the kind of form she had before she was forced to step away from the sport. She’s still on the mend but is satisfied with her progress. At the National Championships last month, she shot a 581 in qualification and won bronze in the final. Although she only shot a 576 in the national games, she feels her grouping of shots is improving.

Rahi, by her own assessment, is moving closer to performing the way she wants. She has made changes to the way she prepares.

“I think now my approach is to give more importance to my intuitions. If I need a break, I need a break. I’m not doubting my intuitions any more. Although my doctors think that my condition was caused because of COVID, they also feel that overtraining might have triggered some of the symptoms. So I’m learning to step away from practice if I feel I’ve had a very hard days training. I’m also working on getting fitter and stronger. The purpose of these changes aren’t just to make me a better shooter. Shooting is important but my goal is to lead a healthy life,” she says.

While staying healthy is her primary goal, Rahi knows the shooting will follow.

“I want eventually to compete at the Los Angeles Olympics. But there are going to be so many young and talented shooters there. I can’t take my own performance for granted. I still have the hunger for the sport and I’m still very ambitious. I want to get better. I want to remain that shooter who the younger generations will see as a competitor.”