All sportspersons carry some sort of reminder of their choice of profession. Wrestlers have cauliflower ears, judokas twisted knuckles, and weightlifters grazed shins. Manu Bhaker has her own memento as well. There’s a pressure sore around her thumb and forefinger and an angry red bunion at the base of her palm, around where she grips the wooden stock of her Pardini pistol. Her weapon’s hilt is custom-shaped, designed as much as possible to follow the curve of her palm.
There’s only so much it can do. Each time she fires a .22-inch caliber brass bullet, 1.4 kilos of wood and iron kick back and bite into her flesh. The 22-year-old is fully conscious of the blemish on her hand. “It’s not something I can get rid of. I’ve tried to treat it with creams but it’s never going to disappear as long as I shoot. It will always be there,” she admits.
The pressure sore around Manu Bhaker’s thumb and forefinger is a memento of the sport of her calling. | Photo Credit: JONATHAN SELVARAJ
The battle scars will last as long as she shoots. What will stay even after that are the two Olympic bronze medals Manu will return to India with. She’s already journeyed far into legend at this point. And she very nearly went even further. Competing in the final of the women’s 25m pistol event, she finished fourth, by the barest of margins losing a four-shots-to-three shootout to the reigning world champion Veronica Major of Hungary.
For most of the competition, she was right there fighting not just to stay in the competition but often sometimes for the lead. She was in third place after the fifth series of five shots and in second -- just one behind the leader and eventual winner Jiin Yang of Korea after the sixth and seventh. A weak eighth series saw Major force a shootoff and a missed fourth shot ended up seeing the Indian eliminated by a single point.
The result was almost an anticlimax for the dozens of Indian journalists and fans who had made the 250km journey from Paris to this provincial French town in the wee hours of Saturday. They had done so for no other reason but the certainty that a 22-year-old girl who had already made so much history was going to make more of it. For the first time, Bhaker returned from finals range at Chateauroux without a medal around her neck. After her event, she returned to her chair placed next to the firing line for eliminated shooters, she almost seemed quizzical at exactly what just happened.
After her event, she returned to her chair placed next to the firing line for eliminated shooters, she almost seemed quizzical at exactly what just happened. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR
She teared up at that moment and coach Munkhbayar Dorjsuren who was sitting behind her reached out with a hug to console her. The moment was still raw. But once Manu had had a few minutes to process her emotion she was able to start to see her fourth place for what it was – a solid result to cap a near-perfect tournament.
“Fourth position definitely does not feel amazing, but there’s always a next time and certainly it’s going to be there for me. I have two medals and lots of motivation to work on for the next time. And I will try my best and work really hard so that I can try and give a better finish to India next time,” Manu said after the match.
Jaspal Rana, the coach whose partnership had worked such wonders said the tournament couldn’t have gone very much better. “Two medals are incredible. A third would have been a miracle,” Rana said later.
Never one to be pleased very easily, Rana will finally admit some amount of satisfaction after the match. His face for once isn’t set in a permanent scowl as it is in the shooting range but in an easy smile. For all the recriminations a fourth-place finish usually draws in India, it has to be said that Manu couldn’t have shot very much better.
For most of the women’s 25m pistol final, Manu was right there fighting not just to stay in the competition but often sometimes for the lead. | Photo Credit: RITU RAJ KONWAR
It’s hard to find much fault with how she shot on Saturday and indeed the past week. The Indian shot in a manner not far out of a coaching manual.
“It was perfect. Her lifts (when shooters pick up the gun on the signal and bring it down to the target) were perfect. Her time to shoot (Shooters have 3 seconds to take each shot in a series of 5) was exactly what we have been practising for the last 13 months that we have been training together,” says Rana.
But there was something else that even her competitors noticed. “Air pistol and sport pistol are of course different. For air pistol, you of course don’t want to see too much movement in the gun and you want to see some follow-through than when you shoot a sport pistol. But at the end of the day, when it comes to pistol shooting, it all comes down to consistency. When I saw the Indian shooter, I could tell that she was someone who had control of what she was doing. There were no moments where she broke emotion-wise or through inconsistency,” says USA pistol coach Jason Turner.
But while pistol might be a sport of consistency, the sport is also one of fine margin. In contrast to events like the 10m air pistol event where scores are counted to the decimal point and then totalled, sport shooters can only hit (score above a 10.2) or miss (score anything outside it). A bad score in air pistol might be devastating but it’s not insurmountable in women’s 25m pistol.
Indeed the Korean shooter who would go on to win gold in the event fired three shots that only managed to hit the frame of the target. A single shot like that would have all but eliminated her from the competition then. In the 25m pistol event, all it registered was a no hit – just the same as a score of 10.1.
“Even though Manu didn’t get that medal, I am happy that she was much better than her. She handled her pressure as well as she could have. And if it didn’t work out for her this time, it will work out eventually and that’s what matters because this is not the end for Manu,” he says.
There’s no great mystery about this consistency he says. The secret lies in consistency itself. “The fact that Manu performed as well as she did, The way she shoots. The way she lifts so cleanly. The way she follows through her shots. The way she kept her composure. She couldn’t have done it without the six hours of training we did each day. She has the proof of her effort in her mark on her hands. That is the hand of a shooter,” he says.
He promises Manu’s hand will carry the same marks for a long time to come. “There’s nothing good about missing a medal but it keeps her hunger alive for Los Angeles 2028,” he says.
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