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.’

Shooting, like all sport, is about incremental improvements.

Everyone, after all, wants to be the first on any moon.

Great athletes don’t just exhale this positivity, they surround themselves with similar people. Not yes-men, but believers.

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.

Fame doesn’t last, it cannot stand in comparison to the pursuit of excellence.

But 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.

In his Hall of Fame speech, Michael Jordan remembered coaches and officials and players who had slighted him, who had underestimated him. I never forgot either. In my heart rested not hate but defiance: I’ll show them. My time would come.

Shooting in Wiesbaden was also a privilege because there were no power cuts. The machines never broke down. The range was never unclean. Environment is important for a shooter, for any sportsperson. You feel good about your craft, you feel energized. You are also never distracted from your mission. When ranges fall into disrepair, it’s like no one cares, it is like a disrespect to the art form you are trying to pursue.

In India, we have a famous word for trips abroad: EXPOSURE. Everyone needs it. Even if your ranges are littered with talent at home, as India’s are now, you need to taste different environments, light conditions, range backgrounds. Just waking up in a place of foreign voices and strange breakfasts can be unsettling. Your mind takes journeys it shouldn’t. The more you travel, the less surprised you are.

Rumour insisted that if a Chinese shooter failed to score a 596 in training he had to miss his next meal. Not here. They tried to relax me, got me to laugh at my mistakes, turned the volume down on seriousness. ‘Too intense, Abhinav,’ was a frequent refrain. In their group, as is the way in Europe and Australia, a convivial atmosphere prevailed. Jokes and teasing, especially of the fresher, are part of sporting routine. But jokes and teasing are not always an Indian staple in the sporting workplace. Me, I had no sense of humour. But eventually, slowly, agonizingly, I learnt to give back. I was shy, too, Eastern boy stuck in a Western world. In Gaby’s house, if you wanted food, you grabbed it from the fridge. You washed your glass. You made yourself at home. This was foreign to me, as if it was almost rude to rummage through someone’s kitchen even though I lived with them. For Gaby it was painful. Always they had to ask: don’t you want to eat something? Only then I did.

One night—and this was on the phone—Gaby and I spoke for two intense hours, just on tension in my neck to tension in my little finger. Heinz, amused, exasperated, as he listened in, thought we’d gone insane. Even our meals weren’t quiet, an idea emerging, a chair pushed back, a chicken left uneaten, as we leapt into shooting positions and examined them. I was trying to create a robust technique, a confluence of standing, thinking, breathing, holding, sighting, firing that wouldn’t break down. I was making minute changes in equipment, all based on feel. It was an environment I craved, what Heinz called ‘zero tolerance’. They were teaching me what I would somewhat master eight years later: learning to be perfect on an imperfect day.

Once, in the old days, my gun went through the X-Ray machine in Delhi without anyone realizing those bits of broken-up steel were a dismantled weapon. It did not fill my heart with confidence over security.

The wiser you get as a shooter the less you want to travel with a team. It’s painful. One gun to be examined at Chinese customs is painfully acceptable. But twenty! You sit in dank airport halls, exhausted, as serial numbers are matched to every gun for security reasons. In 2008 I had to spend nine hours at a police station in Nanjing airport before I was cleared. It doesn’t end there either. After the airport comes only the promise of a long car ride ahead. Shooters never go to hotels. They drive straight to the range to deposit their guns. It is always a long day.

In the end, no one cares, record books don’t have asterisks for bad luck and lost luggage.

A variety of athletes trained at the US Olympic Training Centre—swimmers, boxers, volleyballers, weighlifters, winter athletes—and there was a wider sense of camaraderie. Different men, competing women, but on similar missions. In this city, the Olympics meant something. I could hear it in the inquisitiveness and enthusiasm of taxi drivers and strangers once they knew where I was headed: what do you play, where do you come from, what are your dreams? In this centre, the Olympics meant everything. The place smelled of fun, ambition, respect, sweat; the centre hummed with energy. It was a place where history lived, where the past was pride and where the future was built. A place where you could trace every US Olympic athlete on a computer and walk the Hall of Fame, a place of such athletic beauty that visitors arrived every day. In a single year, roughly 140,000.

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. The Americans truly believe they are the best, and luckiest, country. They weren’t going to the Olympics carrying awe and content just to try, they were going to the Olympics to succeed, make history, be remembered. It was an adventure, a collective one, and I was awed by the importance they gave to team and the building of it. Great athletes littered the corridors. Hey, here’s Apollo Ohno, the legendary skater, there’s Matthew Emmons, the to-be Olympic hero, there goes a younger, yet-to-assert-himself Michael Phelps. Their vitality stunned me and more importantly, infected me through a sort of osmotic effect. Watch, copy, learn, imbibe. If you train with them, and beat them, the discovery is beautiful and immediate: I can be great, too. The Olympic centre was not ostentatious, but it was slick. From sports medicine to mental training, everything was catered for. This was an integrated approach to greatness. A cafeteria ran 24 hours, offering Oriental, Western, Italian cuisine, offering different food for different disciplines, catering to every weight category, from diminutive gymnast to hulking weightlifter. It was a thoughtfulness we were then yet to replicate in our camps, expecting diverse athletes to function on more or less the same diet of dal, chawal, egg, chicken.

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

Maybe it’s why everyone on the bus wears headphones. I used to wear them with no music on. Like a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. In Beijing I carried around a book whose title I still don’t know. It was my protection from journalists. I just didn’t want to talk.

A publisher in Delhi once sneeringly suggested to me that my Olympic medal was bought. Paid for by daddy, like some parental birthday gift. Give the kid a top-class gun, build him a range, pay for coaches, and hey presto, it will come. I smiled thinly. I guess the Ambanis and Tatas never thought of this. Medal for hire for their progeny, that sort of thing. It bothered me, not the personal accusation, but the facile idea that medals are for sale. As if there is some shop where you buy desire, purchase sweat, get resoluteness on sale. There is a lack of comprehension here, about digging, about how obsession is a disease that athletes like me actually want to get.

Dry Firing in Dark Room (2005) In this blackness, like being imprisoned in a cupboard, I have no visual sense, so I must function only on my instinct. I sense my body more acutely, I am more alert and conscious of my muscles. I stand in the dark, gun in firing position, and concentrate, and it gives me awareness of my balance and stability. To use a rough analogy, it is like rowers finding synchronicity by rowing blindfolded.

Players who are unused to Centre Court at Wimbledon can apparently get unsettled not just by its aura but its size. The space behind and outside the lines is larger than in outside courts and this extra space can be disorienting. Similarly, the hall for the Olympic final in Beijing was unusually big and I needed to find a sense of myself within it. So I hired a marriage hall for a day in Chandigarh, set up a range in it and practised. It helped me get a sense of spatial awareness.

Hi Abhinav, I just wanted to wish you all the best for tomorrow. As I have said to you before, I believe that your dedication and professionalism—the most important personality traits—leave you with nothing left to prove to anyone, including yourself. You have already achieved what really matters. Now all that remains is the shooting. Tim

you become that very Indian of things: the Chief Guest.

In Delhi, a politician told me, nicely, that a controversy was building about his non-appearance at the airport on my arrival. ‘Please say that you were happy with the welcome,’ he pleaded. I felt for him, for how does sport become this madness?

That was when the postman lugged sacks of mail into my Chandigarh home every day. Telegrams, thousands of them, from my fellow Indians. Roughly 380,000. Some just addressed Abhinav Bindra, Chandigarh. Some containing marriage proposals (I still get them), even calls to my mother.

Heinz described winning ‘as a big crisis, a real disaster’, for he appreciated both the neurotic quality of the shooter and the dilemmas of a mission accomplished. At least four of the Olympic champions he coached suffered after winning, with heart disease, diabetes, hormonal problems.

I took a long while to comprehend this feeling. Gaby and Heinz came to India, so did Uwe, who wrote me the most sensitive and perceptive letter after Beijing, which in part read: Now you will enter ‘another’ world and the world ‘out there’ does have expectations. You are the only ‘white Bengal tiger’ left in the universal Indian circus. Depression: indeed this is called ‘post victory depression’ and in fact symptoms are very similar and closely associated to ‘post war syndrome’. Your ‘war’ is over… nothing more to fight for! Batteries are done, head is empty, been left ‘alone’ and inner emptiness is prominent… Like sitting in the movies trying to look at your own film and not knowing the script… Nevertheless its part of your ‘new life’. Peace and quietness associated with some relaxing physical activities will create the environment of limiting the depressive moods… If you feel its getting too much consider a ‘time out’…. Don’t try to match up with the Indian society’s hopes and expectations! They will ‘eat you alive’… and I do know a good number of people which did never recover from that experience.

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.

No one person breaks a barrier alone, no one arrives at a sporting moon alone.

But the preface to the Games, disturbing and embarrassing, lingered. Athletes were calling me from abroad, will it happen, should I come? I found my room at the Athletes’ Village layered with mitti, the toilet leaking, but some quick housekeeping fixed it. Of course, television channels insisted I had thrown a tantrum, hurled keys and demanded a single room, refusing to share with a wrestler. Admittedly, from some angles, shotgun shooter Mansher Singh does look like one, but he was my roommate. The TV story was disappointing yet almost predictable, for much of television journalism in India is nothing but an excitable dance with facts. I respect the media, I enjoy thoughtful writers who care to look under the skin of both the athlete and his sport, but occasionally there is a sensitivity missing. At the Commonwealth Games, a writer called: Can you talk about Gagan Narang and your rivalry? At 10 pm? On the night before my event? No way. But don’t answer and you’re arrogant.

Kya beta, do you really need this? Questions are fair, accountability is necessary. I even got some funding then, for which I am grateful. And post-Beijing, the unnecessary questions began to decrease as the association and the sports ministry started to sniff professionalism. But it is how you are questioned, it is the identity of the questioners sometimes, that I objected to.

But in India, we must swim through chaos on the way to a medal. It almost feels as if our medals are more meaningful, considering what we go through to win one.

At the Beijing Olympics, the Americans spent US $3 million to set up a high-performance centre for their athletes at Beijing Normal University.

The finest ammunition is within India’s financial grasp, it is the will to deliver the ammunition on time to shooters, the ability to take a Sunday morning drive to the customs shed 30 kilometres away, which is the issue.

We can start with a clear separation between administrators and experts, for sport has a managerial aspect and a training aspect. Former athletes don’t always understand organization and babus can’t fathom the intricacies of sport. Each must know his place.

Both are accountable, but a coach cannot be unless he has freedom, for he is an artist and his team a creation. Stanislav Lapidus had plans, but in 2010 roughly 5 per cent were implemented. Which makes it impossible to judge him. It frustrates experts; this kind of treatment led Indian hockey coach Richard Charlesworth, the great Australian, to walk out and his successor, José Brasa from Spain, to dramatically tell The Times of India: ‘I have lost. Your system has won. I tried my best to change it. I pleaded, I cried, I did everything. But it won’t budge.’ The federation officials cannot be allowed to defeat the coach.

there’s no finish line to greatness.