View, Review: Indian shooting needs to outgrow its victim mentality vis-à-vis CWG
Shooting has a storied hory in India of individual enterprise and collective agony — the heartbreak of the missed medals and the elusive wait (10 years right now) will continue into Paris. But for a sport that’s received much love from loyal Indian obsessives who sit making sense of its utterly cumbersome scoring, the pining after a lowly competition like the Commonwealth Games, gets infinitely boggling.
Why would a sport seek out a platform where the field is thin and the inflated medal count neither funnels the competitive zest nor fulfills the parameters of excellence. Birmingham dropped shooting because the logics of a range are too unwieldy, and Victorian hosts in 2026 have kept shooting out of the programme in the initial l, as the Games look for innovation and youth engagement. (Youth being the fans, not the shooters themselves necessarily). Community engagement is another stated goal of the CWG, and shooting which carries a gun-taboo in these edgy times, is not exactly a community outreach model in sport beyond the air weaponry.
Any objective analysis of broadcasters’ feedback from the previous Olympics or multi-sport Games will leave the best TV producers boggled about what exactly can be done with this sport. Zooming in on facial tensions with the slightest furrow on the brow during a final, has been done before. And short of VFX enhancing a pellet in mid-spin, there’s little room to maneuvre around how the sport can be jazzed up. Experiments with scoring continue, in order to desperately find a format that might strike a chord. But it’ll be naive to question why Shooting isn’t the first to be pencilled in when Games hosts get down to selecting sports.
There are murmurs and occasional outbursts in India about shooting being targetted to keep India out of the top medals tally. The classic victim-playing on a Games platform with its colonial overtones. But even if the disproportionately large number of shooting medals are factored in, India will still not top the table (search for: 2010 Delhi Games figures), and anyone who follows Shooting knows these don’t translate to the World Championships and Olympics always.
Central Asian Republics, China, USA, Russia, Germany and Iran are some of shooting’s powerhouses (sustained Olympics + World’s medals), and none of these are in the Commonwealth. Quite akin to why wrestling too struggles to excite CWG – it wasn’t at Melbourne in 2006 either. Carping about colonial conspiracies, and threatening boycotts, pullouts and other churlish brinkmanship IOA, has helped noone. For a country that proudly hosted the CWG as the only independent Republic in hory (not under the British crown) ever to do so, the fits thrown Indian sporting bodies everytime shooting goes out, are now tiresome. Especially when you know the Asian, World Championship and Olympic medals are what the sport should solely work towards rather than look for laughably easy pickings.
That India’s participation is at the mercy of the hosts’ choice in picking their sports and a juvenile threat vis a vis shooting, is deeply disrespectful to other disciplines. Track and Field, which boasts of a new Indian Olympic champion, would want its young bunch of jumpers and throwers and relay runners to compete against the best from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, England and Australia. It doesn’t get bigger than CWG for squash, and India’s not even gotten started on realically competing in swimming after breaching the ‘A’ standard of qualification last year. Gymnastics has spectacularly botched its follow-up to two good showings in 2010 and 2014, with noone having come through the ranks. And hockey hasn’t exactly regained the bragging gold it ought to have at the CWG level since 1998. So India keeps relying on sports that can disappear from the horizon of CWG – shooting and wrestling, instead of using the competitive fields in disciplines where world-level talent pits their wits.
Fooling the funding system is easy in India with no knowledgeable oversight, and state governments are not known to do their basic research while declaring cash benefits for any medal brought home, like feudal royalty of the 16th Century.
IOA’s firm belief that this is aimed at pulling down India to settle its victim crisis, muddies the benefits of competition in disciplines like T&F, boxing and hockey. For once, three World Championship medalls in men’s singles badminton are from the Commonwealth. And some pretty ignorant calls to devalue the CWG because India can’t stomp about in two disciplines of shooting and wrestling – the hosts’ choice – denies athletes in other sports their platform to break through, given Asia is weaker in some of those same events.
Shooting has its own battles of relevance to fight, though it is safely ensconced in Olympics till 2028 at least. Innovating on the sport can still help it sneak into the 2026 Victoria Games and spur on other tweaks to help it deal with its iffy broadcast numbers from every Olympics, though esports is expected to get an edge-ways look-in in 2026.
It can appear bewildering to Indians that animated first-person shooter or real-time strategy video games, hitherto restricted to darkened room consoles, can replace their beloved Shooting. Go one-level deeper though, and a few assumptions about the sport’s global popularity unravel.
There’s no doubt Messrs Rathore, Bindra, Narang and Vijay Kumar who marauded Olympic medals a decade back, as well as the likes of Jaspal Rana, Samresh ‘Goldfinger’ Jung, Ronjan Sodhi, Jitu Rai and most recently Saurabh Chaudhary, have given Indian sport some memorable moments of triumph internationally. It’s not terribly contingent that you had watched them all in real-time on TV to remember this. Shooting memories can be hazy with the important headlines sticking on.
The likes of Anjali Bhagwat, Suma Shirur, Heena Sidhu, Rahi Sarnobat, Apurvi Chandela and the two teens Elavenil Valarivan and Manu Bhaker have been patient tryers as India searches for its first female Olympic medall in sport shooting. But it wasn’t just the missing big medal that stopped them from equalling the name recall of racquet sports female stars, who were on TV more often.
Shooting is a sport that needed one of India’s finest sports writers, Rohit Brijnath, to prise open the mind of the country’s first individual gold medall, and connect concentric targets & decimal scores piping up on screens with loyal followers’ comprehension of what they were watching.
Fans of the sport typically loved applauding how the medals were magically held aloft, but didn’t quite seem to understand the minutiae of levitation involved in all of it. Translating what the man and the weapon actually did in pursuit of India’s glorious first gold medal in non-hockey, thus needed the best of wordsmiths.
Ballics involve invisible speed, which only Neo of Matrix seems to see, mostly because he’s dodging them to stay alive. For the rest of us mortals sitting behind sport shooters on the range, you hear a shot, a score flashes, positions in standings go up and down after every crackle, and Voila! a medal fetches up. Or doesn’t, as the case may be.
The intricacies will more often than not never reger, and are far too internalised and intuitive for shooters to always frame into words. So shooting needs interactive thought bubbles or gun-whispering interpreters, and a vocabulary that goes beyond the five words – gold, silver, bronze, no medal.
India’s blessed with marksmen who are intelligent and engaging, but there’s only so much you can explain about keeping an eye on the fluttering flags in a 50 metre range. Or about why the cheek / chin needs to mould around the weapon in a certain fashion. Small talk on the sport, in a country that can obsess for days over whether it’s fair to run out a batsman backing up in cricket, can at best extend to a pol malfunction and why Manu Bhaker didn’t use a spare one at the Olympics. Forget the casuals, even the diehards are groping in the dark when they speak authoritatively on the sport. A thick wall of gun-jargon blocks all understanding.
India’s also blessed with the most inscrutable faces on and off the range – no-nonsense athletes whose constant meditative states you wouldn’t want to barge into and ask frivolously about their favourite flavour of icecream. There’s a forebodingly stoic nature of their sport that just doesn’t lend itself to colour in sport like most other sports would, nor are rivalries greatly bitter to talk about these. Not that you would want them pumping fs and screaming in glee or disgust.
But the sport, even globally, operates in sanitised silences in near niche circles, where a fan cannot really plunge into a debate with a fellow follower on comparative techniques of standing still and aiming at a point. Nor is he equipped for it. Try dissecting Virat Kohli’s elusive wait for the next Test century, and even he might tune in. Try figuring out what Saurabh Chaudhary needs to do to win a medal, and you’ll be firing mental blanks for years, and he’ll not betray one emotion for you to get interpretive.
Yet for a period spanning 3 Olympics between 2004 and 2012 and the two CWG and Asiads wedged in between, the sport delivered on its priority sport investment in funding, propping India from its modest medals table standings. Privately, Bindra raised the bar for the detailing in preparation that goes in towards a medal with what can only be called some breathless globetrotting in order to achieve peak stillness for his gold (We are still googling what a pizza pole is!). And Narang and Vijay Kumar were amongst the earliest beneficiaries of non-profits stepping in to give a leg-up to athletes, helping them realise their ambitions internationally. Both their talents – Narang had an intuitive feel for adjusting to subtle surroundings like wind speed and range-light, and Vijay was spectacularly quick in rapid-fire.
The sport has brought India many laurels in the past and might well continue to. But to expect the entire Indian sporting fraternity to strain and focus on a dot-point target, is nothing less than myopic. The legends of the sport didn’t need the CWG to etch their names in Hory.
