"Here in Beijing, during the final, I kept reminding myself of that. I kept thinking, that was much more scary, much more nerve-wracking than the competition here," Abhinav Bindra told Outlook about his preparations for Beijing. This learned fearlessness is what helped the ace shooter’s shot at gold and glory, enabling him to break the jinx of India never having won an individual gold medal.
It isn’t easy: standing 10 metres away, the bull’s eye a 0.5 mm dot on black paper. An imperceptible twitch of the muscle can mar your shot, the slightest break in concentration make you miss the mark. To be a champion, you have to regulate the flow of blood and breath, exercise incredible control over the body. For the final of the men’s 10 metres rifle event, Bindra qualified joint third, two points behind Finland’s Henri Hakkinen and one behind China’s Zhu Qinan.
Bindra knew that he must turn aggressor and kill fear. But there was a sudden complication. In the break after qualifying, lasting 75 minutes, Bindra and his team had retired for rest and left his guns unattended. When he returned, and took aim for warm-up, Bindra’s first shot was worth 4.2—an impossibility for a shooter at the Olympics level. It emerged that the sighting mechanism of Bindra’s rifle had become mysteriously "misadjusted". India’s chief shooting coach, Sunny Thomas, told Outlook that he was almost "100 per cent" certain that Bindra’s rifle had been tampered with. "It is impossible that the change in setting could have happened accidentally," he said. "It was done by someone’s hand, I’m quite certain."
Pan-Indian paens: Schoolchildren in Ahmedabad celebrate Bindra's achievement
This seemed a cruel reprise of his Olympics experience four years ago. At Athens, an uneven floor had caused complications and then heartbreak for Bindra. At his training in Germany, Bindra had learnt to overcome that, learnt to stare into the abyss. Now, he quietly, quickly calibrated the "sights" to the correct setting, inhaled deeply, and took aim.
It worked. His first shot fetched him a very heartening 10.7 points. More of the same followed over the next few tense minutes. With his seventh shot, a 10.6, Bindra killed the competition. Qinan couldn’t stop crying and Hakkinen wore a long face. Bindra himself was a picture of poise and restraint. With barely a smile on his face, he said he couldn’t describe how happy he was, nor fathom why no Indian had won an Olympics gold before him. Asked if he was looking forward to returning to India, he said, "I don’t really like planes, you know."
For someone who was lured to shooting by a love for guns and the "idea of fame", Bindra seemed to be tetchily clutching at anonymity at the pinnacle of his achievement. Scholarly of appearance, shy and retiring in demeanour, this son of a millionaire is someone who’s polite and civil but who doesn’t suffer fools easily. His reactions to some of the media’s questions—which, his friends say, can be "exasperatingly stupid"—are often a smirk or a grimace.
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At Beijing, he wasn’t quite willing to play the star, eschewing grandiloquent words to describe his history-making feat. He still refuses to trumpet his remarkable feat, or dress it in colours saffron, white and green, much to the disappointment of those who are ever eager to appropriate every individual achievement for the nation-building enterprise. This restraint must be acknowledged as a rarity in today’s sports. A champion must decide to what extent, and at what terms, he would engage with the world. It’s the privilege he has paid for in pain, both physical and mental.
When asked why he didn’t look really delighted after winning gold, Bindra said, "I was born with a poker face." Some might find this remark cheeky, others would say it shows the young man’s lack of communication skills. But, really, Bindra’s persona is partly a function of his sport. Shooting encourages solitary existence. Ace shooter Ronjan Sodhi, who has travelled with Bindra on several occasions, says this discipline can turn even the most gregarious into introverts. In a hall echoing with staccato bursts of guns, hours and hours are spent with ears covered and eyes trained on a minute spot in the distance. "It’s unlikely you will meet extrovert shooters," says Sodhi. As part of training, a budding shooter is taught to control emotions; a lapse in concentration could mean defeat. It soon becomes a personality trait, perhaps the reason why Bindra didn’t overly celebrate the gold.
In Bindra, this studied restraint has become exaggerated because he wasn’t boisterous even as a child. Born in 1982 at Dehradun, he shifted to Chandigarh in 1995. Teachers at Chandigarh’s St Stephen’s School remember him as a quiet boy, fairly good at studies, not up to any mischief. The only prank he indulged in childhood was to shoot at water-filled balloons balanced atop a housemaid’s maids. This, the legend goes, was how he took to shooting. Says his uncle, Bonny Duggal, "As a little boy in Dehradun, he was forever shooting birds or beer bottles, or riding a cycle."
Bindra has always been strong in his resolve, and aimed high. St Stephen’s School principal Harold Carver recalls the promise that the 15-year-old Bindra made at a school assembly 11 years ago: "He told the students that one day he’d win a gold medal for the country." And though he’d come to school in a Mercedes, he wasn’t a typical rich brat throwing his weight around.
The proud and overjoyed Bindra parents
His friends from school, surprised at the focus on his personality, are quick to dispel the growing perception that he is snooty. Says childhood friend Rajat Kakkar, "Had he been at the celebration (in Chandigarh) on Monday, he would have sat quietly in a corner, met a few people and then retired to his room."
Snooty or not, Bindra’s class background (see Home on theRange) was a vital factor in the blossoming of his career. With guns and ammunition that have to be imported at a cost ranging anywhere between Rs 80,000 and Rs 3 lakh, shooting can’t be an everyman’s choice. "More than 80 per cent of shooters in India are from affluent families or the armed forces," says Sodhi. Often, most of these shooters belong to the North Indian landed gentry, boasting a tradition of love for guns. Says former tennis player Manisha Malhotra, who works for the Mittal Champions Trust that supports Bindra and other Indian Olympians, "Sports in India is demarcated on demographic lines. The best archers, for instance, are from the Northeast and the top boxers are from Manipur and Haryana. For India to have a reliable system of producing champions, all sports have to be popular at the national level."
Indeed, India has produced shooting champions not because of but despite the creaking system. The Tughlaqabad shooting range, for instance, is in urgent need of refurbishment. No wonder the country’s top 15-20 shooters train abroad, either in Italy or Germany. True, their expenses, particularly in the last four years after Rathore won a silver at Athens, are defrayed by the government. But to enter this select group, a budding shooter must necessarily come from a wealthy background. A senior official of the National Rifle Association of India told Outlook that Bindra won gold only because he had world-class training facilities at home. "You can’t win a gold medal at the Olympics if you train only at the Tughlaqabad range," he remarked.
There’s also the accountability factor. Over the years, government funding of sports has become liberal but results haven’t been commensurate. "What are the repercussions of not winning a medal? There must be reward and punishment for performance. There has to be accountability," says Manisha.
Accountability is not widespread in Indian sport, so it’s naive to expect Bindra’s gold to open the floodgates. For the moment, though, toast the quiet man from Chandigarh who has gone great lengths to scale Olympian heights.
By Rohit Mahajan in Beijing with Chander Suta Dogra
