With Olympic rings ‘in his heart’, shooter Vijayveer Sidhu looks to make India proud at Paris 2024 Games

Unlike many Olympic aspirants, the screensaver on Vijayveer Sidhu isn’t a picture of the five interlocked rings. It’s a picture of the mountains of Leh instead.

Vijayveer is part of a circle of friends who love to travel and often keeps their pictures as his wallpaper. In turn, they put up pictures of Vijayveer shooting when he travels abroad with the Indian shooting team.

“It’s normal for us to put each other’s pictures on our phone screens. I found that pictures of Leh give me a lot of peace. Recently, I was testing the barrel of my pistol in Germany and I clicked (photos from the German countryside) and posted them in our friend’s group.

My friend who had travelled to Leh put up the same picture on his phone screen,” he says.

The 21-year-old from Chandigarh doesn’t think he needs to ostentatiously put Olympic rings up in front. “It’s not as if the Olympics don’t mean anything to me,” says Vijaveer. “I think if something is very important to you, it needs to be inside your heart,” he says.

At the end of the qualification round of the fourth and final Olympic selection trials in the men’s 25m rapid-fire pistol conducted by the National Rifle Association of India (NRAI) in Bhopal on Monday, Vijaveer mathematically secured his place as one of the two Indians who will compete at the Paris Games.

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According to the selection policy laid out by the NRAI, the average of Vijayveer’s three best scores were 580 (+.2 for placing third in the final), 580 (+ .4 for placing second in the final) and 581 (with Tuesday’s final yet to be determined) would be higher than the average score of the three best scores of his nearest competitor Bhavesh Shekhawat – 580, 580 (+.6), 581 (with Tuesday’s final yet to be determined).

While the two were deadlocked before Tuesday’s final, what edged Vijayveer was two extra points since he had won the Olympic quota for India at the Asian Championships, earlier this year.

Despite the pressure to perform, Vijayveer says he wasn’t looking at his rivals shooting in the lane, right next to him. “At that point, you don’t see the score and you don’t really notice what the others are shooting,” he says.

Ask Vijayveer if there is one word he would use to describe his performance over the four selection trials and he would insist it is consistency. Except for the first competition where he dipped under the 580 benchmark, Vijaveer managed to put up what he termed ‘decent’ numbers.

He insisted that he was calm throughout the four trials.

“I actually think there was an advantage of winning the quota. I’d already won it before. So, I knew I could do it again. I’d also been part of the Indian team that had competed in all the major tournaments over the past year. I’d taken part in the Asian Games, World Championships and the four Olympic quota competitions,” he says.

“I performed decently in all of them. I shot only 577 in the world championships but although it wasn’t great, it wasn’t a disaster. I didn’t think that I would shoot so differently at the trials. I’m using the same gun, the same ammunition and the same target. So why should anything else change.”

Even as his Olympic ticket has been punched, Vijayveer, who had encountered the sport completely by accident as a 10-year-old, can scarcely believe what he has accomplished.

“I have always been into sports. When I was a kid, I was part of a summer sports camp at my school where I played all sorts of games. One day, an athlete walked into the school grounds with a giant case,” he recalls.

“When I asked my PT (physical training) teacher what that was, he told me that it was an air gun.”

Vijaveer later learnt that his school already had an air gun range. He was immediately intrigued not just about the weapons but also about the fact that kids, who participated in shooting (sport), got the first period of the school day off.

“That was my biggest motivation back then,” he laughs.

His parents, both school teachers, encouraged him and his twin brother Udayveer to take up the sport. The two turned out to be prodigiously good and, by the summer of 2017, were part of the junior Indian team.

Vijayveer, who started shooting a rapid fire pistol and an air pistol, specialised in the former eventually. He adds that his peak arrived over the past year.

“If I introspect, the mental maturity I have for matches now is a lot more than what it used to be. I feel that I can do things better than before. I can analyse things better, understand them and act accordingly and efficiently.

“For example, in the past, if I was standing in one lane, I was constantly thinking about the score I was aiming for. I would glance at what the guy standing next to me was shooting. If the first round wasn’t going well, (where shooters get eight seconds to take their series of five shots) I’d start to panic.

The first stage is my stronger event and, if I didn’t shoot well over there, I felt I would struggle in the second and third rounds (where shooters have six seconds and four seconds to take their five shots respectively),” he says.

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It’s not like that anymore.

“Even if I don’t have a great first round, it doesn’t seem to bother me. I was able to shoot consistently over the entire day of qualifying. Technically, I didn’t have any great swings in technique,” he says.

Vijayveer attributes some of that change in mentality to coach Gurpreet Singh with whom he has been working for over six months.

“Before I started working with him (Gurpreet), I was mostly working by myself. It was very challenging. It wasn’t the best thing to have done but I can’t change the past. I have a lot of trust in him. You need a common point with your coach. I feel very familiar with him,” he says.

While Gurpreet wasn’t in Bhopal, Vijayveer’s twin Udayveer was, a fact he was grateful for.

“He has been one of my biggest supporters. We learn from each other all the time. At the qualification round, he was the one who was standing behind me and letting me know in case I was doing something wrong,” he says.

Neither Gurpreet nor Udayveer is likely to be travelling with Vijayveer in Paris but he feels he has refined his technique to the point that he is comfortable to be on his own.

“Right now I am in a good place,” says Vijayveer, “I just have to work on small techniques and a little polishing. Apart from my training, I have to focus a lot on my rest and recovery,” he says.

As he counts down the days to Paris, Vijayveer says he isn’t going to put too much pressure on himself.

“I’m proud of going to the Olympics but it’s not the biggest deal for me. It’s a part of my life but it’s not my life. My friends will be my friends whether or not I win a medal. But one thing they’ll expect from me is to take pictures and share it with them,” he says.