A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold

by Abhinav Bindra

wrestler named Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav, who won independent India’s first individual medal, a wrestling bronze, in 1952.

Dreams require a team.

For many parents, children are the vehicles to sustain their unfinished dreams, as if there is some unfulfilled athlete, some disaffected dreamer, within them.

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.

But if I don’t have V.V.S. Laxman’s hand-eye magic, or Leander Paes’s instinctive athleticism, I do have one thing: fine motor control.

Play with someone better and it inspires you to match them. Ego comes into play. You look, you learn, you find a way to become better, so much better that you can beat this better person.

1998 world junior championships. Their advice was uncomplicated and sensible: exposure and competition was the only way. Not everyone agreed. Our national association was slow to respond. So was coach Sunny Thomas. Eventually, the trip was cleared but the cost was mine. I could afford it, but what if I couldn’t?

adrenaline injecting into my system. Footballers relish it, but not shooters. We don’t know what to do with adrenaline. We want a monk’s calm, or a state of arousal only to a particular, precise point.

Finding solutions to anxiety was almost like a hobby. You try everything, almost nothing works. Eventually you learn to live with it, you hate the fear but you accept it. You train your mind to work through it.

Lovely depiction

A world-class shooter in the mid-1930s, Takacs injured his right hand in a grenade accident. So he switched to his left hand, practised, and won gold at the 1948 London Olympics. He was thirty-eight. In 1952, at forty-two, he won a second gold.

Almost every shooting club in every range in every European town has at least a few shooting lanes with electronic targets. For years India’s best ranges didn’t. Now, thankfully, we have eighty electronic shooting points in Delhi and Pune. It’s great, but it’s not enough.

Karnam Malleswari for her bronze in women’s weightlifting, which sparked a wonderful celebration in the Village late at night after her event ended and she returned.

Not changing a winning game, or altering a winning team, is a flawed theory for it suggests a game, or team, cannot get better.

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

honesty without appropriate timing can be counter-productive.

IT’S NOT EVERY FOUR YEARS. IT’S EVERY DAY.

Olympics

Samadhi Tank does. It is a flotation tank, a capsule, where you are deprived of light. You lie in 10 centimetres of water to which is added roughly 200 kilograms of Epsom salts to make it buoyant.

My respiratory rate prior to the Olympics was fourteen to fifteen cycles per minute, but I learn, slow down, slow down, and by the time I get to Beijing it is down to four to five cycles per minute.

??

The brain’s left side (T3 or Broca’s Area) is responsible for generating language, from within it emerge the conversations that rattle through our head. Am I ready? Should I fire?

Then I opened my phone. Six hundred missed calls. I was famous. And Athens was history.

In 1988, the fastidiously organized China won five golds at the Seoul Olympics. In Barcelona in 1992, it was sixteen; in Atlanta in 1996, sixteen; in Sydney in 2000, twenty-eight; in Athens in 2006, thirty-two; in Beijing in 2008, fifty-one.