Shooting Wide

Fans of pistolslinger Jaspal Rana might not get to raise a toast to their hero in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The promised moment might just elude them. For Rana;s Swiss Hammerli to make noise with his flat head bullets at the games he has to get a wild card. This for one who at the age of 19 is arguably India's best shooter of all time. Rana's handicap: the shooting events he's good at, centre fire and standard pistol shooting, don't figure in the Olympics. The air and free pistol events which do figure in the format are a bit like Jim corbett stalking a tiger – patience is the key building block. And though Rana wouldn't have been where he is without the virtue floating in his system, the event switch, which he is now attempting in full, will take some time to show results.

Says Australian Tibor Gazol, who is coaching the Indian team, “Rana is young and will take some time to mature. He should target the 2000 Olympics. Besides the air and free pistol events are a bit like long distance running, they last longer. They also require extreme precision. He has got to develop a different mindset. ”

While Rana has taken his tally of international medals to more than 24 since he first started competing internationally in 1991, the eight gold medals that he won in the recently concluded Commonwealth Shooting Championship in New Delhi gave him the maximum pleasure. Says Rana: “My free pistol score of 560 gave me the maximum satisfaction. Though the score wasn't high, it wasn't low either. Trigger control is the main thing in free pistol events and I am learning everyday. ” It was only the second time Rana had shot more than 550, the minimum qualifying score for the event in the Olympics and the one performance that would decide whether he would be lucky enough to get a wild card for Atlanta (he will come to know only in late December). Mansher Singh (trap) has already qualified.

The air pistol event, on the other hand, fetched him 574 points (the world record incidentally, is 590 points). Spread over an hour and 45 minutes, a competitor has to shoot 60 shots over the period, at a maximum of 10 points each shot. The time includes firing sighters (practice shots) so the averge time per shot works out to 90 seconds. Centre fire and standard pistol events are more interesting in comparison. That's what hooked Ran to them originally. Says Ashok Pandit, who was dominating the events since 1984 till Rana walked on to the scene: “There are so many variations in them. We have slow fire, time fire, semi-fast and fast fire. ” In standard, for instance, you get to fire 20 slow shots, roughly 30 seconds for each shot over 25 metres. Then 20 second series of five shots each and finally four series of five shots spread over 10 seconds. Rana is the best at this fast shooting called duelling. Says Gazol: “He goes ahead in duelling over competitors. In centre fire over 30 shots in duelling he dropped only two points in the last Asian games. He shot 298.”

Pandit, in fact, goes on to say that if centre fire and standard shooting were Olympic events Rana would definitely figure in the medals. Even air pistol became an Olympic discipline as late as 1984. Though Pandit feels that Rana is still not Olympic material in air pistol and free pistol events, his mental toughness and youth could see him amongst the medals by the year 2000. Says he: “The first time India achieved some kind of Asian status in shooting was when Sharad Chauhan came on the scene in 1974. But Rana is certainly the best Indian shooter I have seen. He's raised the standard all around. ”

Rana's own shooting regimen is very taxing. Something his rivals admit puts him way above the others. Says Vivek Singh, 19, and one of Rana's competitors in the air pistol event: “He practises phenomenally. Sometimes it's just him and his father there at the range. ” His six-seven hour daily grill sees him shoot 300 bullets (mercifully, the Government is providing him free ammunition till the run up to just pulling a trigger. Behind the simple act goes a lot of mental preparation. ”

But with Rana facing hardly any competition at all at the national level it would be a tragedy if he is not exposed to superior shooters abroad on a regular basis. Or he might just face the fate of Pandit who had no competition in his shooting event for eight long years and therefore stopped working hard and didn't improve. Also, for Rana himself, the challenge lies in making a smooth transition from his current fun approach to the whole thing to one which borders on obsession. We don't want him to end up like another Limba Ram, or do we?