A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold

by Abhinav Bindra

Gold just refusing to come in an individual sport till it had the smell of a curse about it.

He’d spent a life focused on a single moment and at twenty-five, when our lives are only commencing, his moment was done.

It makes it uncommonly hard to win a major event, to be more perfect than perfect men on the perfect day.

I need to know I did everything to be the best, whether it concerns my gun, my nutrition, my technique, my brain, my body.

I never felt the burden of a nation waiting, but I appreciated how long it had been waiting.

we have to exist on the very edge of perfection.

But this message was vital for me, for I was naturally negative, driven to almost a mild depression when results were erratic.

once got yak milk from China because I was told it enhances concentration. (It didn’t.) I attached electrodes to my head to view the activity in my brain when I shot well. I lasered off my love handles.

It is a bunch of extraordinary people who make champions out of ordinary kids.

For many parents, children are the vehicles to sustain their unfinished dreams,

The individuality and solitude of shooting, the reality that any success or failure rested entirely with me, was intriguing.

So much of India is about knowing the right people, everyone has a friend of a friend who can help.

Now I think my way was almost unreasonable and believe you shouldn’t start shooting with such religiosity till your mid-teens.

If I loved practice, if I believed sweat was the finest polish in sport, he was the reason.

My parents had given me everything. But fame I had to earn for myself.

My German coach, Heinz Reinkemeier’s favourite story is of me and Valentina Turisini, the Italian Olympic silver medallist, playing badminton in his garden in a university town in Germany.

cannot believe it; I have never seen two such untalented movers.’

Still, it spoke of my rage to be better and partially accounts for the fact that I was greying by the time I was twenty-one.

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

Officials were stunned and refused to accept it. In front of my name stood no result.

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 my heart rested not hate but defiance: I’ll show them. My time would come.

They also confirmed that Eley would send me 50,000 Wasp No.1 pellets every year, along with Eley promotional items for me to carry on with my shooting.

It’s the way it is in sport. Play with someone better and it inspires you to match them.

In the range in Tughlakabad in Delhi, prior to the 2010 Commonwealth Games renovation, electricity would cease, air conditioners stop, targets break down.

Eventually, the trip was cleared but the cost was mine. I could afford it, but what if I couldn’t?

On competition day, I fidget and fuss. I am assailed by anxiety, I can feel adrenaline injecting into my system.

Shooting is embedded in my brain, frivolity isn’t. At twenty-nine now, I am beginning to learn that smiling isn’t a sin. Am I fun? Not on the surface. For too long my interests were too few, my life condensed to my sport. No girlfriends. No parties. No hobbies. No distractions. I watch movies, carrying ten to twelve around on long trips, but they are only my escape. Next morning, ask me the story and I couldn’t tell you. Food is not a fascination, though the older I get the harder I search for Indian restaurants abroad. Familiarity becomes comfort.

If you’re too aware of your surroundings, you might over-think.

If you’re too blank, you can miss this moment.

Just waking up in a place of foreign voices and strange breakfasts can be unsettling. Your mind takes journeys it shouldn’t.

No finer story exists than the one about the Hungarian Karoly Takacs, recounted by David Wallechinsky in his Olympic compendium, The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics. 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.

Exploding targets as they do is more aggressive than puncturing them like I do.

It was useless, it’s hard to disguise you’re a kid or well-off or own a nice gun.

him the results. He glanced at them and was taken aback. Scores are the finest allies for they are almost impossible to argue with. Now Thomas, a genial man who has held the shooting team together for decades, altered his tone, his manner changed, respect arrived. Going abroad wasn’t as hard anymore.

Anjali Bhagwat was proof of such Indian capability, her scores were world class, even in practice, where she whipped me by 5-6 points. Getting beaten by girls is not always fun, but by this brilliant woman it was just fine.

is time, but subconsciously you know you are being timed. In the

We’re talking about the range to prepare Olympic shooters. It’s beyond sad, it’s pathetic.

Bassham lost an Olympic shooting gold in 1972 but won in 1976 and used his experience to forge a system that helps athletes manage pressure.

‘like an autistic boy living in his own universe’.

Me, I had no sense of humour. But eventually, slowly, agonizingly, I learnt to give back.

Risk is also invigorating, trying something new helps stimulate the mind in a shooting environment that is based on repetition and flirts with staleness.

Great athletes interrogate themselves, review their games, it is precisely how they avoid stagnancy.

Their discipline, their perseverance, moved me then as it does now.

Sport never halts after an Olympics, only a fresh cycle begins, a year torn from the four-year Olympic calendar.

Aggression doesn’t necessarily translate into speed, it means you are focused, it shows intent, it means being brave with your trigger.

You learn a taste which never goes away, the taste of pride when it is being swallowed.

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

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

His sport matters. It emerges from obscurity, from beneath the weight of cricket, to breathe and strut and pose for the cameras.