Mihir Vasavda at Asian Games: War room where India’s shooting he was planned | Asian-games News

INDIA’S TEENAGE army of shooters continued to strike gold in Hangzhou, with 17-year-old Palak Gulia adding a sixth gold medal to the country’s kitty on Friday. The seed of this golden harvest, after the medal famine at the last two Olympics, were sown in a tiny room in Delhi’s Tughlakabad.In a cramped space, TV monitors and projectors are used to recreate the look and feel of a competition range and simulate match situations, and hi-tech devices attached to a shooter’s body analyse every muscle twitch, activities of the brain cells, pulse rate and breathing patterns.
“It helps us find our most balanced state. I had a lot of sessions there,” said Palak, the surprise winner of the 10m air pol gold medal. “That helped a lot,” said 19-year-old Esha Singh, who won four medals in the pol events, including a silver behind Palak in the 10m air pol.
The 18 medals India has won so far in shooting at the Asian Games is the most the country has won in a single edition. Four of those came on Friday. Apart from the two women medalls, Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar, who finished the Games with four medals, staged a sensational comeback to win a silver in the 50m Rifle 3-position, in which India also won the team gold medal.
Playing in front of partisan crowds against a strong Chinese team, some of India’s young shooters looked unflappable under pressure. The reason, they said, was the simulation of such situations at the “war room”.
“We have training camps before every international tournament and even when there are no camps, we go to the range where we do this (analysis) after training,” Palak said. “Our High-Performance Director uses a device he has made to monitor our pulse rate, breathing patterns etc. With that data, we can self-regulate.”
India’s High-Performance Director, Pierre Beauchamp, is a numbers man who has played ice hockey and coached teams. He has worked with footballers and golfers and his philosophies have been adopted the US Navy Seals and scients at NASA.
Hangzhou: Gold medal shooter India’s Palak and silver medal compatriot Esha Singh pose with their medals after the finals of women’s 10m air pol (individual) event at the 19th Asian Games, in Hangzhou, China, Friday, Sept. 29, 2023. (PTI)
His latest assignment is to help India return among medals at the Olympics in a sport where the country’s athletes have finished on the podium at three back-to-back games between 2004 and 2012.
To achieve this, Beauchamp has embarked on a data-collection mission, the kind of which that’s never seen before in Indian shooting. The “war room” is his laboratory.
India coach Ronak Pandit said the purpose of this exercise, started last year, is to make athletes “used to” the chaos of a final, where Indian shooters have often been guilty of succumbing under pressure.
“There’s no point doing meditation or focus exercises in isolation in a quiet room. The whole idea is to focus on chaos. You see there’s so much loud music and drama in the final’s hall,” Pandit said.
The name “war room” was kept at the suggestion of the team’s psycholog. “We are fighters basically. When you come to sport, a player knows it’s not going to be easy. You have to fight it out for everything till the end. Our words, our attitude reflect that and hence the psycholog calls it the war room. You go in there to fight,” Pandit said.
The “war room” is located inside the final hall of the Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range in Tughlakabad. Every day after training, each athlete spends up to 30 to 45 minutes inside the room in the presence of coaches, sports scients and sports psychologs.
A projector beams the image of a shooting range on the wall. On one monitor, the video of a final is played and the shooter then has to play along going through their entire process.
Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar, center, takes part as Team India which went on to win gold after the qualifications round for the Shooting 50m Rifle 3 Positions Team Men’s competition of the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, Friday, Sept. 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
“It is about placing the athletes in those final situations. Like, if you have just three shots left and you need a 10.8, can you shoot that?” Beauchamp, who joined the team last year in April, said.
Biofeedback devices are attached to shooters’ bodies and they give real-time data on heart rates and breathing patterns. Details such as skin temperature and respiration rates are also monitored. “Accordingly, the psycholog and technical coaches can work with them,” Pandit said.
gathering all the details, the coaches have been trying to determine the “exact shot-cycle signature” for each shooter – the time when she is most relaxed to pull the trigger.Most Read
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Pandit said the coaches keep updating the war room, depending on the tournament where the team will be competing. “Before coming here, we had the war room changed to the Asian Games range. Now, we have already started hunting for photos of the range in Jakarta (where the Olympic qualification tournament will be held in January) so that we can prepare the room for that competition,” Pandit said.

Reluctant to buy into a new idea, not all shooters are using the war room so far. But the coaches are expecting that the Asian Games performance will change the minds of a few.
“I would say 90 per cent of the athletes who have made use of it have won medals. Those who are not making use of it haven’t won. So the data is obvious,” Pandit said.