Rudrankksh Balasaheb Patil has a couple of posters put up in his room at his home in the Mumbai suburb of Thane. The posters with ‘Paris 2024’ printed on them in bold letters are meant to remind the 18-year-old air rifle shooter of his dream of winning a medal at the Olympics. One of the poster is at eye level, for Rudrankksh to see when he enters his room. The others is mounted not on a wall but on the ceiling, right above his bed.
“Rudrankksh put it up last year. He told me he pasted it up there because he wanted ‘Paris 2024’ to be the last thing he sees when he looks up before he goes to sleep and the first thing he sees when he wakes up,” says his father Balasaheb Patil.
As he looked skywards again at the Olympic city shooting range in Cairo on Friday, Patil would have felt his Olympic dream was just that little bit closer.
Seconds earlier, he had squeezed the trigger for the final time in the gold medal match of the 10m air rifle competition at the ISSF World Championships. His pellet had registered a score of 10.5 while his opponent in the gold medal match, Danillo Sollazo of Italy, had only scored a 10.2. The two points he had picked up for having the higher score had secured for him a 17-13 win and the gold medal. He had already won a quota spot for the Paris Olympics a few minutes earlier by virtue of finishing in the top 4.
Rudrankksh had been trailing Sollazo, himself a teenage talent, 4-10 earlier. He had only made the final two, pipping out China’s Olympic silver medallist Lihao Sheng, with his final shot in the ranking round.
While the Olympic quota belongs to the country, Patil’s gold medal is all his. And it is special. While India has won many gold medals at the world cups, title wins at the World Championships (for all events), which come only every 4 years, are far rarer. The gold medal was the first for India in the 10m air rifle category at the World Championships. -- since Abhinav Bindra won his in 2006. It also marks him out as a rifle shooter to watch out for, Beginning from 2006, winners of the 10m air rifle event at the World Championships have gone on to medal at the subsequent Olympic games. That’s just the kind of omen Indian shooting, which had a disastrous Olympic campaign in Tokyo will be hoping for in Paris in a couple of years time.
Rudrankksh’s gold certainly didn’t come easy.
Patil topped qualification with 633.9. He didn’t have a single shot under 10.1. Indeed, as the competition got harder he got better. In the gold medal match, 11 of the 15 shots Patil took scored 10.5 or higher – an incredibly high standard. There can be no caveats to his performance. This was a stacked field in Cairo (With the exception of Russia’s Vladimir Maslennikov, each of the finalists from the Tokyo 2020 Games was participating).
“All these shooters are those Rudrankksh has idolised,” says Balasaheb. “He is a huge fan of (China’s) Yang Haoran and (Hungary’s) Istvan Peni. Even in the past, he would keep talking of them. He would discuss how they train. How they stand. How they behave during a competition. He used to watch videos of them. He admires their style. He likes observing how they play. He reads up everything about them. When there is a shooter he likes, he tries to find out everything about them. He was really excited that he was going to be competing with them at Cairo,” says Balasaheb.
Rudrankksh topped the qualifying event with a score of 633.9. | Photo Credit: ISSF
Where Rudrankksh might once have been poring over his competitors biographies, its likely a few will be doing the same for him now.
Patil’s shooting career started entirely by chance six years ago when Balasaheb, a deputy commissioner of Police in Mumbai, had been invited to inaugurate a shooting range in Thane. “I was just there as the chief guest. But before the ceremony, we got talking and he asked me what my son was doing. At that time, Rudrankksh used to play football and chess. But we just decided to give shooting a chance as well,” he says.
Rudrankksh’s parents would discover that he was pretty good at it. “He trained at the start with Snehal Papalkar. He had very good results in the first year. He had medals at the district, state and nationals inside his first year. He got a lot of praise from his school and recognition so that encouraged him. At that time, Rudranksh was a good chess player. He had played and won matches at the school and district level but because of the encouragement he was getting in shooting he decided to pursue it,” says Balasaheb.
The early success took his parents by surprise. “At that time I only had a vague idea of shooting. I knew that Abhinav Bindra had won a gold at the Olympics and I remember reading that his rifle was really complex. I didn’t know much else. But, Rudrankksh’s coach told us he was good and he was enthusiastic so that was good enough for me,” says Balasaheb.
That enthusiasm has never waned. “He’s always been someone who gives 100 percent to anything he does. If he plays chess, he is full of enthusiasm. Ever since I put him in shooting, he’s never had to be told to go and train. He has had his ups and downs but he’s always enthusiastic about shooting,” says Balasaheb.
The downside of having success at a young age like Rudrankksh did was in the fact that he didn’t have a regular school experience. “Ever since he was about 13, his life has been about shooting. For a couple of years he had started training in the Balasaheb shooting range in Ville Parle. At that time he was spending nearly 8 hours a day in travel and practise. At that time he felt really sad that he didn’t have friends like other kids. He rarely went to school so how could he have friends. But then I told him, right now you don’t have friends but at some point the same guys are going to say that you were their batchmate,” says Balasaheb.
That’s indeed how it’s turned out, Balasaheb says. In 2021, Rudrankksh won a silver medal at the Junior World Championships and followed that up with a gold medal at the ISSF Junior World Cup in Suhl earlier this year.
But Rudrankksh, his father says, was always looking towards the senior level. “He was only 17 years old at the time of the Olympics but he was really disappointed that he had not qualified. He took some time but he got over it. His reasoning was that he had not earned the qualification. He felt even if he had gone to the Olympics, he didn’t have the experience to compete and win a medal,” he says.
Rudrankksh won the gold medal in men’s 10m air rifle event at the National Games in Ahmedabad. | Photo Credit: File Photo
Rudrankksh has been slowly building himself up for the senior stage. He took part in two World Cups this year, reaching the final at the one in Cairo. Just a week ago, he emphasised his position as the best in India by winning gold at the National Games in Ahmedabad. Now he’s cemented that claim with the World Championship medal and the Olympic quota.
Balasaheb knows his son will be happy and is likely to be celebrating the win. “He is a bit of a foodie. Whenever he travels abroad, he makes it a point to try something from the place. He’ll probably have a good meal after this win. He loves his chicken and his pasta,” he says.
But while he might allow himself a bit of revelry in Cairo, Balasaheb knows that his son is already preparing for the next challenge. “The Olympic medal has always been his goal. He told me during the Olympics that if he goes to Paris, he will be so well prepared that he wins a medal. That’s his mentality, Even now that he’s won a quota, he’s only going to be thinking about that medal,” says Balasaheb.
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