A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold

by Abhinav Bindra

Shooting is worse, you can’t even blame anyone, cannot excuse failure as a rival’s inspired day, a referee’s error, a lucky bounce. Only one person is responsible for defeat. You.

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

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

I’ll show them. My time would come.

It’s why the shooter needs to beg, borrow, plead for a plane ticket and go out into the world. He needs to listen, watch, hear, learn by osmosis. He needs to get an education. Especially if he’s from India. Because here expertise is hard to find and legends don’t sit in local locker rooms. At least not in my time.

Money helps, of course, but money doesn’t make you a champion; something inside and indefinable does.

to polish diamonds you need diamond dust.

To stay sane, defeat requires bizarre justification. Like ‘Oh, I really didn’t want to win that competition,’ or ‘This event isn’t really important to my build-up.’ But it hurts, deep within, like an open wound in the mind that is beyond suture.

‘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.’

forget controversy, stand up for yourself.

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.

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

The athlete cannot mute his instinct because competition is a lonely business and instinct is sometimes his only reliable friend in the arena.

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.

It is a failure to learn that sets us back, a chalta hai attitude that mocks the idea of any culture of excellence.