Two medals and a lot of motivation
Double Olympic medallist Bhaker misses podium in the 25m air pistol, but the fourth place has motivated her to improve and reset
For a brief stretch towards the fag end of her Paris Games campaign, Manu Bhaker’s level, eye-poppingly high all through the week, dipped a wee bit in the women’s 25m pistol final on Saturday.
Tied-second with French shooter Camille Jedrzejewski at the end of 35 shots across seven series, Manu missed five out of the next 10 shots to slip. First into the fickle world of a shootoff, and then out of the familiar space of a medal.
After her final shot in the fiveshot shootout sequence, which she lost to Hungary’s Veronika Major to finish with a total of 28 hits out of 40, Manu shook her head. She walked back slowly towards those neatly arranged chairs awaiting the nearly-there finalists.
Munkhbayar Dorjsuren, India’s foreign pistol coach, stood up to give her fellow two-time Olympic medallist a hug.
Through every second of that immediate disappointment, keeping his gaze fixed on Manu, Jaspal Rana was seated behind in the stands. Manu sat still with her head down as Korea’s gold medallist Jiin Yang and silver medallist Jedrzejewski took the tense final to another shootoff for gold. The Indian smiled and got up as the medallists, finally placed in order, posed together.
Manu knew she could’ve been there, signing off from her second Olympics, stretching history to loftier heights.
Two medals were won, and a third had been whisked away from her grasp. It pinched a touch at that particular moment, and perhaps provides a direction to build towards in the next Olympic cycle.
“This fourth-place finish will keep her alive,” Rana, assessing
Paris 2024 while looking at Los Angeles 2028, said.
Standing hours after the final under the blazing sun, Manu echoed her coach’s sentiment. “I guess I’m taking home two bronze medals and lots of motivation to work even harder from this Olympics,” she said in a chat.
She reckons the bruises on her knuckles and wrist on the right shooting arm from all those hours of holding the pistol and firing away in training, will stay with her for life. A bit like how she stayed in the zone for almost every second of her competitive shooting this week. The qualification scores were strong and her body language was composed in a high-stakes final.
At one point in the middle of the week, you almost knew Manu would turn up, pull the trigger to near perfection, push the button of consistency in her shooting and plant herself just where she wanted to be, no matter the external circumstances.
“You know, earlier, I was this very impulsive kind of person,” Manu said about finding that zone. “I would punch the wall, do all kinds of things in anger. My sport has taught me so much patience. And that, after so many years of hard work and patience, has made me who I am today. This zone that is talked about, it just comes naturally when you’ve been doing something for this long. You know what’s the best zone to be in for you to deliver on that day.”
On the day of the 25m final, she was a bit off from that “best zone”. The start, which comprised three misses in five shots that placed her sixth after the first series, was an indication. She gradually got going and began picking up to fourth, tied second and tied third after a perfect series of 50 in the fifth series. But the end, through those costly bunch of misses in the last couple of series, was a confirmation of the exception.
“This match was a rollercoaster,” she said. “The beginning was not so great, but eventually I caught up with the others. And I was like, ‘OK, just do your best.
Try’. I was trying, but things were not going my way.”
She wasn’t sure if it was nerves of that present moment that got the better of her towards the end when things got tight. But what she was sure of was that it wasn’t the pressure of winning a third medal.
“As soon as the last matches were over, my coach told me, ‘History is history. Live in the present and then later, you can sit down and think about everything you have done’. Jaspal sir does a great job of keeping me in the present,” she said.
Now for the future. A medal high of such history can take time to soak in and move on from. Manu will indeed pause for a brief bit, but not stop. Work towards chipping away at the room for improvement will restart again, with a goal that, despite an unprecedented twomedal Olympics by an Indian athlete, is yet to be fulfilled. An Olympic gold.
“Fourth position does not feel amazing, but there’s always a next time. And there certainly is going to be a next time for me,” Manu said. “There’s lots of motivation to work harder for that next time so that I can try and give a better finish to India, as long as possible and as many Olympics as possible.”
Rutvick Mehta HT In Paris
As soon as the last matches were over, my coach told me, ‘History is history. Live in the present and then later, you can sit down and think about everything you have done’. MANU BHAKER, Indian shooter