There was a moment early in the final of the women’s 10m air pistol event at the Olympic Games at Chateauroux when Manu Bhaker turned away from the target in front of her towards the spectators’ gallery.
She knew exactly where to look.
When she entered the finals hall a few minutes before, Manu had scanned the faces in the crowd sitting in the bleachers behind her. She had looked past the sea of spectators with a smattering of hopeful Indian faces and zeroed in on a man in dark glasses with a notebook in his hands. It was her coach Jaspal Rana. She would remember his position, to the extreme left hand side of the viewing gallery.
Now, having shot two consecutive scores of 9.6 in her eighth and ninth shots of the finals, Manu had slipped from inside the medal bracket to fourth place, behind Asian champion Thu Vinh Trinh of Vietnam. She needed reassurance.
As she looked at him, Rana would close his fist and bring it close to his chest. “Be brave. All that she needed was inside her,” he’d say in a wordless sign that Manu would understand immediately. She didn’t need to look to him, she only needed to look within.
The moment of nervousness passed. Manu turned back once more, steely eyed, towards the targets 10 meters in front of her. She lifted her pistol once again, aimed at the black dot in the centre of the target and fired. The score read 10.3 on the digital board above her. That was good enough to place her inside the medal bracket. She’d never leave it again. While she competed, there was no other moment where even a hint of emotion creased her face.
She held her nerve while others crumbled around her. Three-time World Cup gold winner Veronica Major was the first to fall. She would be followed by Turkey’s Junior world champion Tarhan Sevval Ilayda. China’s Asian Games champion Jiang Ranxin dropped out following three shots in the ‘8’ point ring over four series. World Championship bronze medalist Li Xue exited right after. Finally, it was the turn of Asian bronze medallist, Vietnam’s Thu Vinh Trinh, to bow out.
Manu though, outside of that early blip, was never out of medal contention in the final – and was even in silver medal position going into the final shot of the competition. Manu was leading by .1 at that point but South Korea’s Yeji Kim shot 10.5 to the Indian’s 10.3 to nose ahead by 0.1 and clinch silver with 241.3.
It was only then that Manu cracked a wry smile – the first real bits of emotion she’d shown in a while - at what could have been. When she had her medal placed around her neck, she even wiped away a few tears. It didn’t matter at this point. She’d already done more than enough to create history – winning India’s first medal at the Paris 2024 Olympics with a score of 221.7.
South Korea’s Oh Ye-jin took the gold with a score of 243.2.
It was nerveless shooting in the most stressful of situations. The ability to stay calm can’t be taken for granted. And while it may have looked easy, it’s something that’s been worked on and paid for – in some cases quite literally.
A few weeks ago, at the conclusion of their performance, a street dancing troupe held out a hat in front of two Indians having dinner at a cafe in Luxembourg. They had expected a few coins at most for their efforts. Instead, their eyes bulged as a young woman emptied a stack of euros in their makeshift bowl.
The slightly glum donor was Manu, who was training in the European country ahead of the Olympic Games. The 22-year-old’s generosity was enforced and part of a training method employed by the other Indian at the table, Jaspal Rana.
It was designed to make sure she’d never let the intensity of training slip. It was a way to replicate as much as possible the stress Manu felt during a competition, in the otherwise inconsequential environs of a training hall.
As part of the system, Rana would set ambitious targets for his shooter. She would be given a target, of say 582 (out of a theoretically possible 600 in air pistol).
The consequence of any shortfall was a fine. If she shot a 578, Manu would have to pay a fine of four euros, or whatever the local currency was. All the collected money would go to charity.
Closing into the Olympics – the biggest stress test there is for athletes – Rana had progressively raised the stakes - one euro for every point missed became 10 euros. Then 20 euros. The eventual sum of money – a windfall for some lucky street performer – was priceless for Manu.
Manu credited multiple things for her ability to stay calm amidst the chaos. A day before her final, when she’d been combating nerves, she’d been reading the verse in the Bhagavad Gita – where Sri Krishna guides the Pandava prince Arjuna in his own moment of self-doubt to focus on his duty.
“He tells Arjun, focus on your work, don’t worry about the results tomorrow. So, the same was going on in my mind. I was thinking that whatever would happen today, I’d see it today. I have to give my best every shot. I have the whole evening to think about the outcome,” she said.
But perhaps equally significant was Rana’s unusual methodology. “He made the training so difficult for me that this was not very difficult for me when it came to performing. So yeah, definitely he played a huge role in this medal and definitely it’s the sweat and blood of both of us,” she said after her win.
Manu wasn’t always steely eyed and emotionless. Her equation with Rana was not always as trusting. In contrast to the tears of joy she blinked away in Chatearoux, the last time she competed at the Olympics, she wept in frustration as she competed and failed across three different events.
The Olympics - meant to be the highlight of the then 19-year-old’s career - were anything but. There was no doubting her prodigious talent – at 16, she became the youngest Indian to win gold at the ISSF Shooting World Cup and was soon winning World Cups and Commonwealth Games gold medals for fun and became one of the youngest to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics.
Her impressive results had been achieved while training under Rana, a former two-time Olympian and one of the country’s top pistol shooters in the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium, had helmed a highly successful Indian junior program. He had been Manu’s coach ever since she made her international debut in 2018.
A disagreement over the makeup of the squad (Rana wanted Manu to focus on two events while she wanted to compete in three) was followed by court intrigues. The mother of all meltdowns involved a heated phone call and Rana walking around New Delhi’s Karni Singh shooting range in a T-Shirt with Manu’s mother’s last caustic message to him.
In the years that followed Manu’s debacle at Tokyo, her own form fluctuated. She even failed to win an individual medal at the Asian Games, where other shooters from India went on to win gold and silver. She says she became disillusioned with the sport. She started thinking about writing the civil services exam. Before that though, as part of a final effort in the middle of last year, she called up Rana once again. Although he admits he would probably not have reached out if he was in her position, he immediately agreed to work with her once she did. “I’ll work with any athlete who gives a hundred per cent. Manu gives 100 per cent. And I will give her 200 per cent,” he said.
On Sunday at Chateauroux, Indians were glad they did. They came together to deliver a performance that was just what Indian shooting had been hoping for.
Both had tears in their eyes at the conclusion of the performance but they know they aren’t done just yet. After her victory ceremony, Manu headed right back to the practice halls to prepare for her next event – the qualifying round of the mixed team on Monday. She also has the women’s 25m pistol events ahead of her. Rana, who headed to the practice hall with her, believes she is capable of medalling in all of them.
While other members of the federation congratulated each other for India’s first medal, Rana quietly made his way out of the finals range. He refused to take credit for Manu’s achievement. “She did this all on her own,” he said.
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