A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold

by Abhinav Bindra

Uwe Riesterer, a German who was my performance consultant, believes Indians handle expectation differently. His generalization goes like this: Constantly tell an American he’s the best, and he will saunter into the arena and say ‘Let’s kick ass and beat the hell out of everyone.’ Tell an Indian he’s the best and he tends to be defensive: ‘I am the best, I better not make a mistake.’

To win you need an internal rage, a desperation, a hardness, and eventually I became a shooter who relished a fight.

you have to stretch yourself to the limit and leave very little to chance. Only then does reward arrive.

Dedication, determination, discipline—which Anil Kumble used to preach to schoolkids as the three Ds—

Milkha would parade up and down a hill in Secunderabad, where a masjid stood on top, with a backpack filled with 20 kilograms of sand to strengthen his legs and lungs. Sometimes he trained under the moonlight, certain that it made more sense to prepare in cooler conditions. He had no real coach then, no lessons in technique, said the colonel, but he had a capacity for pain. The fact that I remember these stories even today is evidence of the influence they had on me. Greatness, I understood early, was a long, sweaty road.

He was an old school gent who thought the rich preferred not to sweat and those who sweated couldn’t afford to shoot.

Back home, believers matter.

‘Whatever your mind can conceive, your heart can believe, you can achieve.’

sports officials in India don’t need evidence,

don’t need to build a case, they just do their thing and strip athletes of confidence.

‘Pressure is like air. Too much and you have a hurricane. Too little and you suffocate. But in the correct amount it is the breath of life.’

They were teaching me what I would somewhat master eight years later: learning to be perfect on an imperfect day.

Everyone can get better and they have to because everyone else is getting better. Great athletes interrogate themselves, review their games, it is precisely how they avoid stagnancy.

This is a game within a sport. The athlete is desperate to see if his changes work, but aware he must give it time to work. Time for the mind to wholly embrace change even as uncertainty lingers: Will it work? Is this right? Time also for the body to adapt. The muscles, so attuned to a particular movement, must be stripped of that memory and must respond to new instructions.

Sport is sustaining in this way, it is replete with new beginnings. In four years, for the defeated, is another Games. Another chance. It is this hope we cling to, this hope we need.

But sometimes you need to lose, painfully, for a weakness to become a strength.

My guns, initially, were like a part of my being. I worshipped them, treated them as possessively and sensitively as one might a child. In time, a detachment grew. But forever I was careful with them.

My gun makes me secure. Without it I am not myself.

‘Deserving’ is a fair question, deserving should be rigorously debated. Awards are nice as long as in India we’re careful not to devalue them.

Arjuna Awards were occasionally dispensed like out of a vending machine and the more

freely we disperse them, the less valuabl...

Pure performance, over time, should determine awards, not sad lobbying by officials i...

The athlete is mostly an insecure beast, the awards tell him his path is true.

Respect is overstated and argument is discouraged by coaches. Athletes are not shown answers but their place.

Honesty matters. Honesty is having people around you willing to say what you don’t want to hear and it’s vital. But honesty without

appropriate timing can be counter-productive.

In India, athletes step forward with hope, in America, at the centre, athletes walked with a bounce. They expected to win because they were people accustomed to winning; they had been carefully polished to win.

Confidence was like some birthright here and they approached the Games without the cynicism whose fumes athletes are forced to inhale every day in sporting India.

mostly it reflected well on a US system that did not see the athlete as simply a victory machine; it acknowledged the reality that success has no guartantee. If anything, the reverse occurs, or, as a Tibetan monk once told Time magazine at the 1992 Olympics: ‘More will lose than win.’

In India, no one cares, no system exists. The injured athlete is cast aside, the retired athlete forgotten. In the US, some athletes get part-time jobs with sponsors. In India, life after sport is not official business.

It isn’t difficult to strip training of monotony, but it requires effort, a series of interested coaches and driven, high-performance managers searching for ways to involve and engage athletes.

Words don’t matter, only actions do. This is a sporting staple, but somewhat untrue. Words do matter, words from coaches, from books, from others athletes, from the heart.

Words that were printed all across the US Olympic Centre. IT’S NOT EVERY FOUR YEARS. IT’S EVERY DAY.

I was so in love with my shooting, so certain of its greatness, that I fell for sports’ oldest trick. The lure of overconfidence.

I was furious for forgetting that form was fickle. It has to be constantly nourished. Nothing is a guarantee, a given; every score requires hard work.

Sport is rarely calm, it is so full of tense, highly strung individuals in their own zones, so full of lists, equipment, routines, that something is always forgotten.

Winning is the only licence to talk in sport.

Sweat and desire is never a sexy

answer, but eventually, if you distil greatness, often this is what it is. Practice, practice, practice, want, want, want. Like you have taken some holy vow.