Paris Olympics: What next for Manu Bhaker 2.0, a third medal in 25m pistol?

It’s been Manu Bhaker 2.0 for the last four days at the remote Chateauroux Shooting Centre, about 200 km outside Paris.

Two days after becoming the first Indian woman shooter to claim an Olympics medal, the Haryanvi has now kept her date with a second medal — this time a bronze for the 10m air pistol mixed team event, in the company of Sarabjot Singh — sending our medal-starved country into a tizzy on Tuesday, 30 July.

There will be crackers bursting and mithai flying around Jhajjar, Bhaker’s birthplace in Haryana, hitherto famous for its wrestlers and boxers. After all, she becomes the first Indian athlete ever to claim two medals in a single edition of the Olympic Games.

Students of Olympics history will rake up Norman Pritchard, the British Indian athlete who won the 200m sprint and the 200m hurdles in Paris 1900 — but he was a Britisher running for India in the pre-Independence era. His was not a win for our nation.    

Can Bhaker add another podium finish with her remaining third event: the 25m women’s pistol competition in Paris?

Given the mental space and form that she seems to be in, it’s a realistic expectation — and one can vouch for her personal coach, Jaspal Rana, to be pushing relentlessly to the final goal.

India’s Olympic journey, as chequered as it has been, has also seen some exceptional woman athletes — P.T. Usha, Mary Kom, Saina Nehwal, P.V. Sindhu (India's only female athlete with two Olympic medals until today). And yet, this pistol shooter from Haryana has rewritten history.   

Even as she achieved a ‘first’ by landing two medals in one Games so far, Bhaker also became only the fourth Indian — after Pritchard, Sushil Kumar (wrestling) and Sindhu — to win multiple individual medals for India at a summer Games. (Abhinav Bindra, who shot to India’s first-ever individual gold in Beijing 2008, came tantalisingly close in Rio 2016, but finished an agonising fourth in the 10m air rifle event.)

While the redemption of Bhaker after her nightmarish campaign in Tokyo has been a favourite theme for the Indian media, the Ambala-born Sarabjot also showed remarkable composure under pressure in his first bow at the Olympics this year.

The young team of Bhaker and Singh, both only 22, finished third with 580 points and 20 perfect shots, to hold off the Korean pair of Xue Li and Wonho Lee 16–8. The latter finished fourth, with 579 points and 18 perfect shots in the bronze medal play-off.

Singh, a beneficiary of the union ministry of sports and youth affair’s TOPS (Target Olympic Podium Scheme), hails from Dheen village in Ambala, Haryana. Born in a farming family to Jatinder Singh and Hardeep Kaur, he studied at DAV College, Chandigarh, and trains under coach Abhishek Rana.

The story goes that, since childhood, Singh wanted to become a footballer — until, at the age of 13, he saw a few kids wielding air guns at a makeshift range during summer camp. In 2014, he approached his father with a request to pursue shooting, but his plea was turned down as it was a ‘pretty expensive’ sport. However, persistence is his special talent and we can't fault his focus on the target: The young Sarabjot Singh insisted for months, finally winning his dad over — with a gold medal at the Junior World Championship, Suhl, in 2019.

Like Bhaker, Singh too has been a Khelo India Scholarship athlete in his initial days. He won his Olympic quota place with a bronze medal in the Asian Championship in Korea in 10m air pistol in 2023. In the Hangzhou Asian Games, he won gold at a team event and silver in a mixed team event to put himself in the frame for the Olympics squad.

Incidentally, shooting and athletics accounted for nearly 50 per cent of India’s historic 107-medal haul in Hangzhou. After the hype over a promising and youthful shooting contingent fell flat in Tokyo, a lot of faith was pinned on the hopefuls again to make shooting a game-changer in Paris.

It seems that first Bhaker and now Singh are charting the right early course, while the likes of Arjun Babuta are also leaving their mark!