Persistence pays off: Aakriti wins maiden international senior medal seven years after debut

When she went into the 50m range of the Karni Singh shooting range at the start of the women’s 50m rifle three-position event at the Asian Shooting Championships, Aakriti Dahiya kept her expectations in check. “There isn’t anything special about this event. It’s just a normal competition,” she reminded herself.

It would prove to be a thoroughly memorable one. Dahiya overcame a few hiccups in qualification and then, with her elated parents in attendance, finished ahead of experienced compatriots Anjum Moudgil and Ashi Chouksey to win silver in the final.

While she might have been pipped to the finish by Kazakhstan’s Sofiya Shulzhenko, there’s no doubting this is a very special medal for the 24-year-old. It’s her first senior international medal and it’s come nearly seven years after she won her first ever one — a bronze in the junior women’s team category in the 10m air rifle event at the 2019 Asian Championships.

While it’s stories of prodigious talents that usually dominate in Indian shooting, Aakriti’s journey to her first senior medal has no less worth. Hers is a story of persistence, of not always having the best support — she still shoots with a rented gun, of supportive parents and of constantly grinding hour after hour in training away before finally getting a moment in the spotlight.

Good omens

Speak to Aakriti’s father, Randeep Dahiya and he’ll tell you he always expected his daughter to get that first major medal even in the years where it seemed far away.

It was Randeep, who had played hockey for Delhi University while studying for his economics degree at SRCC, who encouraged her to take up sport. This initially meant taekwondo before a fortuitous journey to Karni Singh Shooting range. “I was working in the Delhi sports department, and as part of my work, I was visiting schools in the Bhati Mines area. I had taken Aakriti with me and I thought I’d take her to Karni Singh Shooting range as well because it was in the area. When I took her there, we ran into (2004 Olympic double trap silver medallist) Rajyvardhan Rathore and he gave his blessings to her. I always felt this was a great omen for her!” says Randeep.

At 16, Aakriti started shooting air rifle at an academy near her home in New Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh and it was clear she had some talent. She won medals at the school, district and state championships for Haryana.

Her parents believed in her ability. When they felt Aakriti needed specialised coaching, the family — Randeep, his wife and daughter — packed up and moved to Mumbai where she began training under coach Suma Shirur.

The move worked at first, with Aakriti making it to the junior team that won team bronze in the junior women’s 10m air rifle event at the Asian Championships in Doha in 2019. Although she was on the cusp of stepping into the seniors, Aakriti wouldn’t get the breakthrough she had hoped for.

“She was shooting really well and probably at the peak of her game but then COVID struck. It became impossible to train in Mumbai and eventually we had to return to Delhi,” says Randeep.

She returned to Mumbai after the pandemic and while she continued to win medals regularly at the national level, with the level of competition in India only growing in the 10m air rifle event, she simply couldn’t get the results she would have wanted internationally.

New event

In 2024, she made a decision that would come good — deciding to start shooting the 50m three-position event. The 50m 3-position is equally challenging as the 10m air rifle competition, but owing to its gun (which is classified as a firearm and needing a permit) and specialised .22 caliber ammunition, there’s far fewer competitors in the former.

That, though, wasn’t the reason Aakriti started to shoot the event. “I’ve always been interested in the 50m rifle event. It’s very interesting because there are a lot of variables you have to control, like the wind and the change of positions. I didn’t shift because I thought I would win a medal. I just thought I’d enjoy it. It’s a little trickier. It challenges me a little more,” she says.

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Indeed, she says she would have probably started shooting the event a lot sooner but for the fact that she was completing her degree in biotechnology in Mumbai. “There’s a lot of training that goes into the 50m 3-position event. I wanted to wait until after I graduated so I could throw myself into training seriously in it,” she says.

Shooting the new event alongside the 10m air rifle event wasn’t easy, not just because of the additional effort it needed to master it. “50m 3-position event is a very expensive sport with its ammunition and everything. It’s not easy to even get a permit to buy my own weapon. I had to rent a gun from someone who had the permit. At that time, I had no sponsors. It was my parents who supported me,” she says.

Her parents, though, don’t think too much of this. “I can only guess how hard it must have been for her to continue to shoot when it had been so long since your first medal. But she never seemed disheartened. And that was enough for us. It didn’t matter whether she had a medal or not. We would have supported her as long as she wanted to shoot,” says mother Ritu.

No lack of motivation

On her part, Aakriti continued to stay disciplined even when results weren’t coming her way. She continues to train in both the 10m air rifle and 50m air rifle events, currently at the National Centre of Excellence at the Karni Singh range in New Delhi. “I might not have had a medal to show for it, but I never lacked any motivation. Initially, I used to train one in the morning and the other in the evening, but that got too tiring. I then started splitting the week between both events. There are a lot of things in common between the two events, especially when it comes to finding a stable base, so in a way, the training for both complements each other. When I qualified for the Indian team in the 50m rifle event for the Asian Championships, I started training exclusively in that event for a few weeks before the competition,” she says.

Still relatively new in her 50m career, Aakriti says she has some way to improve. Although she shot high scores in the kneeling and prone events in qualification, she struggled in the standing events to finish with a score of 583, which she would find it hard to reach a final in stronger fields than the Asian Championships. In the final as well, Aakriti was leading after the kneeling and prone positions (she was .9 points in front of Shulzhenko at the end of those two stages) before falling back in the standing events.

“I think I’m most satisfied about the fact that I could follow my technique even under pressure. But I still think there are some things that I need to improve such as my shooting in the standing position,” she says.

She’ll have her opportunities to show she can improve, especially in as packed a season as 2026. But while there are several competitions up ahead, including the Asian Games and the World Championships, and despite the fact that she’s just won a major medal, Aakriti isn’t setting any targets.

“This medal is a good achievement. It motivates me to keep pushing myself. It’s a good push but that’s about it. I don’t have any real career goals in shooting. I’m shooting because I enjoy it. The day I stop enjoying this sport I probably won’t be here,” she says.

Published on Feb 10, 2026