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June 4 - June 17, 2018
To win you need an internal rage, a desperation, a hardness, and eventually I became a
shooter who relished a fight.
Are champions born? I don’t think so. It is a bunch of extraordinary people who make champions out of ordinary kids.
How does anything start, a career build? Passion first, chance next?
It’s the way it is in sport. 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.
‘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.’
But sometimes you need to lose, painfully, for a weakness to become a strength.
‘It opens your brain,’ Uwe said. A hike, three hours, four hours, five hours, in clean air, pushes the body to its physical limit. You sit on a rock and life is simple, all you want is a drink of water. Nothing else. For him this was satisfaction of the moment, life lived in the present.
Words that resonated within me. Words that were printed all across the US Olympic Centre.
IT’S NOT EVERY FOUR YEARS. IT’S EVERY DAY.
For a kid, sport is fun, it is pure release, it brings a smile. But innocence gets lost in competition, fun is obscured by results. You are not a child at play, but an athlete at work. It is a different kind of fun, an altered adult pleasure. But for those rare moments when you start performing well, and success flows, perfect 10s coming easily, sport returns to what it initially was. Unadulterated fun. This is how you dreamed it would be.
Fact is, an athlete’s life is an offering of proof.
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.
I even have customized compression underwear, but let’s not go there.
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.
‘Try standing still with your eyes closed and
you’ll find out how many muscles are at work.’
Finally, they ask me: ‘What do you wish to find in Beijing?’ I reply: ‘I don’t want to suffer.’
But they know, in shooting, suffering lines the insides of the sport. It is beyond escape. So a motto is prepared for Beijing. It is simple: ‘Be ready to suffer.’
Some containing marriage proposals (I still get them), even calls to my mother. Gold, I guess, makes even me eligible. You sit, tear open the telegrams, the letters, and listen to yourself read out affection from a stranger. It is beyond description.
Medals look pretty around the neck, but you can’t eat them.
The hero is the district winner, the state conqueror, the national champion, for every medal, of any weight, requires effort. The hero is the athlete who won’t even win any of this, for not everyone can. Because they still strive, he running for family, she swimming for country, sometimes not given a lucky break, missed by a selector, bereft of sponsor, absent of mentor.
In the old days, if asked, how’s it going, we slipped into timidity. Arre, ok, yaar, not bad, chalega. Now ask and they don’t look away, they stare you in the eye, and say: ‘Great.’
