Paris Olympics 2024: Manu mania grips the world, from France to India

It took Sushil Kumar and P. V. Sindhu — two of India’s greatest sportspersons — four years to win a second individual Olympic medal. Now, in the space of three days, Manu has won two of her own.

Manu Bhaker is breathing rarefied air in India’s sporting pantheon at this point. She could potentially be alone at the top. | Photo Credit: AFP

It’s probably fair to say that even a week ago, most Indians would not have heard (let alone pronounced it correctly: it’s Chateau + houh) of Chateauroux — the location of the shooting competition for the Paris Olympics. For the record, the town of 70,000 is located some 300 kilometres south of Paris, almost three hours by train from the French capital, in the heart of the Gaelic countryside.

Now it will be an inseparable pilgrimage site on the map of Indian sporting lore.

Chateauroux gets its name from the 11th-century castle (Chateau) of Raoul, the prince of Deols. But there’s a new queen in town now. Her name is Manu Bhaker.

It’s in Chateauroux that the 22-year-old wrote her name into the history books by accomplishing one of India’s greatest sporting achievements.

It’s hard to do justice to the magnitude of what pistol shooter Manu has accomplished here. Let’s try to put it in perspective. It took 40 years for India to go from one individual medal (through KD Jadhav) to a second one (through Leander Paes). It took Sushil Kumar and P.V. Sindhu — two of India’s greatest sportspersons — four years to win a second individual medal. Now, in the space of three days, in this provincial French town, Manu has won two of her own.

She opened India’s medal tally two days after the opening ceremony with a bronze medal in the women’s 10m air pistol competition. Two days later, in partnership with Sarabjot Singh, she won another bronze in the 10m air pistol mixed team event.

She’s breathing rarefied air in India’s sporting pantheon at this point. She could potentially be alone at the top. At the time of going to press, Manu had another event to go.

A shot in the arm

Crowning glory: Manu Bhaker created history by becoming the first Indian woman to win multiple medals at an Olympic Games with her twin bronze medals in Paris. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR

She’s done more than enough already. Not just for herself or even for Indian shooting — a discipline that had nothing to show for the efforts at the Olympics for 12 years — but for Indian sport. Her shots fired in Chateauroux have sounded all the way in Paris, where the rest of the Indian contingent is competing. She has ignited India’s Olympic campaign — perennially diffident and underconfident — with energy, action, and, more importantly, belief.

“It has given a lot of boost to the whole contingent. Before we came for the match, we saw that she had won the bronze again. So, we were like, ‘It’s our time; nobody can stop us’. Really (feeling) positive,” said Satwik Rankireddy, a medal favourite alongside Chirag Shetty in badminton men’s doubles.

Manu’s humour helps in breaking down the stress of the Games. After winning a second medal in the mixed team event, she told  Sportstar how she once created a fake social media profile to defend two-time Olympic medallist Sindhu from trolls. Sindhu, pursuing her place in history and a third Olympic medal, laughed at the youngster’s unstinted support while wishing Manu the best for a third medal of her own.

The records will show just how many medals she won in such a short time, but only Manu will know how hard it was to get to this point. “It might have looked easy, but it’s not. It was very hard. There were a lot of lessons I had to learn. Not all of them were easy. But they all had a role to play in what I am today,” she says.

She is just 22, but there’s a lifetime of wisdom packed in her. Her story is not just of a prodigy — she had won World Cup and Commonwealth Games gold by the time she was 16 — but of redemption. After a reality check with the harshest of bruising at the Tokyo Olympics, the teenager was put under the kind of stress that few people ever experience and fewer survive. For a lesser person, the story would have ended there.

It took immense strength of character to find her way back into the sport. Nothing will exemplify that personal growth more than how Manu learned to work once again with her coach, Jaspal Rana. It’s a decision he says he never would have made if he were in her shoes. It’s also a decision that, even she says, has been instrumental in her performance at Chateauroux.

Calming influence

There was a moment early in the final of the women’s 10m air pistol event at the Olympic Games when Manu turned away from the target in front of her towards the spectator gallery.

She knew exactly where to look.

When she entered the finals hall a few minutes earlier, 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. She would remember his position on the extreme left-hand side of the viewing gallery.

Deadly duo: Last year, Manu Bhaker decided to return to her former mentor, Jaspal Rana, under whose tutelage she had bagged 10 senior WC medals (2018–2021) and a Commonwealth Games gold medal in 2018. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR

After shooting two consecutive scores of 9.6 in her eighth and ninth shots of the final, Manu had slipped from the medal bracket to fourth place behind Asian Championship bronze medallist Thu Vinh Trinh of Vietnam. She needed reassurance.

As she looked at him, Jaspal would close his fist and bring it close to his chest. “Be brave. All that you need is inside you,” he’d say in a wordless sign, hoping that Manu would understand immediately. She didn’t need to look at him; she only needed to look within.

The moment of nervousness passed. Manu turned back once more, steely-eyed, towards the targets 10 metres in front of her. She lifted her pistol once again, aimed at the black dot in the centre of the target, and fired. 10.3 – the score read on the digital board above her. Good enough to bring her back in 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’d keep her nerve while others crumbled. Three-time World Cup gold winner Veronica Major was the first to fall. She was 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 medallist Li Xue exited right after. Finally, it was the turn of Vinh Trinh.

Manu, though, outside of that early blip, was never out of medal contention in the final and was in the silver medal position going into the final shot of the competition. Manu was leading by .1 at that point, but South Korea’s Kim Yeji shot 10.5 to the Indian’s 10.3 to nose ahead by 0.1.

Relief & joy

Winning moment: Manu Bhaker with gold medallist Oh Ye Jin and silver medallist Kim Yeji, both from Republic of Korea, after the 10m air pistol event. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR

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 the medal 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.

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.

Priceless training regime

A few weeks ago, after 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 into their makeshift bowl.

The slightly glum donor was Manu, who was training in the European country ahead of the Olympic Games. Her generosity was an enforced one, part of a training method employed by the other Indian at the table, Jaspal. It was designed to make sure she’d never let the intensity of training slip. It’s a way to replicate, as much as possible, the stress Manu felt at a competition in the otherwise inconsequential environs of a training hall.

As part of the system, Jaspal would set ambitious targets for his shooter. She’ll be given a target of, say, 582 (out of the theoretically possible 600 in air pistol). The consequence of any shortfall is made up for by a fine. If she shot a 578, Manu would be paying a fine of four Euros. The money was meant for charity.

Closing in on the Olympics, Jaspal progressively raised the stakes. One Euro for every missed point became 10, and then 100. The eventual sum of money was a windfall for some lucky street performers. But the lesson for Manu was priceless.

She’d later credit Jaspal’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 would say after the win.

Metamorphosis

Manu, though, has not always been steely-eyed and emotionless. Her equation with Jaspal 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.

Double whammy: Manu Bhaker won her second bronze medal of the Paris Olympics as she combined with Sarabjot Singh to win bronze in the 10m air pistol mixed team event. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR

The Olympics, meant to be the highlight of the then 19-year-old’s career, were anything but a nightmare. 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 enough winning World Cups and Commonwealth Games gold medals, almost for fun, and became one of the youngest to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics. 

Her impressive results had been achieved while training under Jaspal, a former two-time Olympian and one of the country’s top pistol shooters in the 1990s. At the turn of the millennium, Jaspal helmed a highly successful Indian junior programme. He had been Manu’s coach since she made her international debut in 2018.

A disagreement over the makeup of the squad [Jaspal wanted Manu to focus on two events, while she wanted to compete in three] was followed by court intrigues, the mother of all meltdowns and falling outs that involved a heated phone call and Jaspal walking around New Delhi’s Karni Singh shooting range in a t-shirt with Manu’s mother’s last caustic message to him printed on it.

In the years that followed Manu’s debacle in Tokyo, her form fluctuated. She failed to win a medal in the individual events at the Hangzhou Asian Games, where Indian shooters went on to win two individual gold medals and four silver.

She says she became disillusioned with the sport. She started thinking about writing the Civil Service exam. Before that, though, as a last throw of the dice, she called Jaspal in the middle of last year. Jaspal immediately agreed to work with her. “I’ll work with any athlete who gives a 100 per cent. Manu gives 100 per cent. And I will give her 200 per cent,” he said.

We, as Indians, are glad that he did. They came together to deliver a fairytale performance that Indian sport was praying for.