Bindra delivered the athletes’ oath during the opening ceremony of the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games

Abhinav Bindra made his tryst in destiny at the Beijing Olympics where he became the first Indian ever to pick up an Olympic gold medal. But his journey to Beijing had been a lonely one, as he recounts in his autobiography, that started when he was 13. In a sport where there’s no team for support, half the game was always played out in his head. He started young, trained extensively and then met devastating failure at Athens. Finally, in a nerve-biting finish he triumphed at Beijing meticulously overhauling the rest of the field and making his way to the top.

I was calm, very calm, and a later reading of my blog from the Games surprised even me:

Instead of thinking about shooting perfect bullseyes...today I am going to think of the pretty women in the village, the weather, the great city of Beijing, and whatever else pops into my mind will be allowed to stay as lo ng as it doesn’t involve the words “rifle” and “shooting” in it. Hey all, it is a great time to be an athlete and this event is what we all live for.

My serenity was rattling Gaby (Buehlmann, one of his coaches), it unnerved her, and she called Heinz (Reinkemeier, another coach) and complained: ‘He’s too calm, he’s too calm.’ Heinz attempted to placate her: ‘Relax, he’s ready.’

She remained unconvinced and took a deliberate decision to scare me, to inject some panic into my system. It isn’t illogical. Panic is never far away. No one wants a visit from it during the event, so earlier is better. So Gaby and I face each other, and she speaks like a counsellor:

‘Abi, you realise tomorrow is the Olympics. All the work you put in depends on what you do tomorrow. It is judgment day.’

It’s like she has flicked a switch in my being and a chemical reaction explodes in my brain and my body undergoes a rapid physiological alteration. On my neuro-feedback machine, my skin temp-erature readings would have gone berserk. I am suddenly seized by the enormity of what confronts me, this mission whose worth will be evaluated tomorrow. Butterflies tango in my stomach.

Author : Abhinav Bindra with Rohit Brijnath Price : Rs 399 Publication : Harper Sport an Imprint of HarperCollins India

The answer is a McDonalds meal and a long walk. I am too wired to sleep, but then I’ve already practised going without sleep. I stand in my balcony at 3am and look out into the dark nothingness, another athlete swallowing his fear in this dormitory of the strange and the gifted. But fear is not all I swallow. In Munich, before the Olympics, I was clearing out of my hotel room when I halted inexplicably at the mini-bar. I am not a drinker, yet I seized a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels. It was utterly out of character. Perhaps in a hideaway of my mind I felt the pressure of the Olympics, as if a nervous breakdown was imminent, and I carried it with me. Now, on this sleepless night, I retrieve it from my toilet kit, I twist it open, empty it into my nervous stomach. As if it is an antidote to everything that assails me.

I sleep for an hour towards dawn and I awake fine, ready, rested. ‘Have a good one,’ David Johnson, the US rifle coach, tells me. Breakfast stays down, so it might just be a good day.

Goodbye Athens, Hello Gold

I envy cricketers standing in the midst of Eden Gardens, surrounded by a collective of 100,000 fans, heaving like one worshipful beast. My name has never been chanted, it never will be. I shoot in the sporting equivalent of an antiseptic waiting room, in front of family — if they’re there — and a few fans. But Beijing is different, this is Zhu Qinan country, he is the defending champion, and a crowd has gathered.

I shoot next to him, but we don’t see each other, we’re about four to five feet apart but on separate planets.

Gaby is busy with another shooter, an Italian, so for the qualification phase Maik Eckhardt, a fellow shooter with whom I have often trained, is my coach for the day. My first shot in qualifying is a 10.9. Perfection. In the middle of the centre of the target. But this is qualifying, it only counted as a 10, yet psychologically it has a greater effect.

My first ten shots are worth a 100, then 99, a 100, 98, 100, 99, but by the end I am struggling.

‘I’m losing it,’ I mutter, and Maik reacts anxiously for he mishears me.

‘No, no, you are not losing. You are second or something.’

President Pratibha Patil greets Bindra at Rashtrapati Bhavan after his gold medal win at the 2008 Beijing Olympics

But my feel is slipping away, my technique is edgy, and an error now is unaffordable. I become mechanical, like a mathematician going through his formula, yet I make a mistake. I get too aggressive, my last shot is a 9. It does not cost me my qualification for the final.

Laszlo and Gagan, who finish quickly, are standing behind me, shooters eyeing the shooter. I am conscious of them but undisturbed. I shoot a 596, Gagan a 595, I make the final and he doesn’t. One lousy point after four years can break your resolute heart.

I am fourth after qualifying. Henri Hakkinen from Finland at 598 is first, then defending Olympic champion Zhu Qinan at 597, then Alin George Moldoveanu and me at 596.

I am also annoyed. Unlike the World Cup final, where four hours separate the qualifying round from the final, here the gap is 30 minutes to suit the telecast. Just half an hour to tune your mind to the next mission. But a Doordarshan crew with no sense of place, no concept of sport, wants an interview. Forget it, I growl.

‘Now the shit starts again,’ I laconically tell Maik. He looks unimpressed by such idle chit-chat, he doesn’t want a joke to release the tension.

Bindra finished second at the 10m Air Rifle Event at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games, where Gagan Narang (centre) won gold and James Huckle of England (right) won bronze

‘Got a job to do,’ he grunts.

Amit comes to chat; Gaby, back with me for the final after her shooter doesn’t qualify, wants a smoke. An edginess starts to build. Amit says my eyes are bright, not dull like in Athens. Competition is beautiful, you’re in it, involved, on a high, it’s the waiting that gnaws at the nerves. The guns are being checked again for legality. They can only weigh 5.5 kilograms, not more. You can’t have a magnifier on your sight. The jacket can’t be too stiff.

‘Check the pellets,’ Gaby says.

Done. In my pocket.

‘Check the equipment.’

Jacket, trousers, eye glasses.

But no glove.

Everything takes on a slight hysteria at these times, as if time is fleeing. Frantically I dig, search, unearth, toss, where? Two searches later, it’s there, in the ammo box.

Phew.

Gaby has been talking to me as if I have already won. How the ceremony would go, the drug tests, the press conference, not being presumptuous but preparing my mind for success. The last thing she says is like a mantra, a prayer, a reminder of why I am here, of who I am. After Athens, she was afraid I would take that trauma into every other final, so she pushed me constantly to be aggressive. Now, she says:

The shooter in action

‘Ok, Abi, I just want you to think for a minute about Athens, how they had stolen your medal. But for that stupid floor, you would have won a medal there. So stay aggressive, from first shot to last.’

I have five minutes of sighting time. And then, right then, in the final, disaster strikes with no prelude.

My gun is supposed to be ready, aligned, sights fixed. Except my first sighting shot, like a warm-up, is a 4.

A 4?

In the white of the target?

I shoot another.

4.2.

I am stunned. I haven’t shot a 4 since I was thirteen years I old.

‘I look at Gaby, what is this? It should have been 10s.

A sighting shot is just a routine check, it usually requires only a marginal adjusting of the sights. This was like Rafael Nadal finding his gut tension was ten pounds off when one pound is enough for a racket change.

I believe someone fiddled with my gun when it was left alone in the preparation area. Conspiracies don’t attract me, but a sight cannot shift so much, or go so haywire, on its own. Gaby doesn’t agree, she thinks on the walk up a narrow staircase, or in the crowded changing area, the sight was accidentally knocked. But that is irrelevant right now, I am adjusting my sight frantically, clicking away furiously.

Every click adjusts the gun sight, either .1mm higher or lower, either .1mm left or right. Usually you need two to four clicks to get your gun perfectly set. I need forty to align it that day.

Maybe something is broken. Maybe this is some deathly deja vu, maybe I have offended some Olympic God. Gaby can’t speak, she, too, is thinking: ‘God, not again. It cannot be this trauma again?’ But she doesn’t panic. She’s been a shooter for twenty years, she understands the value of a competitor knowing he has a cool coach behind him. She opens her scope and studies the target. Is the target Ok? She speaks to the technical people, sitting beside her, who are in charge of the scoring system. They check. It’s fine. She thinks that I look in control. She is relieved.

Moldoveanu, my fellow shooter standing next to me, can see what is transpiring. Later, I hear he thought: it’s over for the Indian. One person less.

Tick, tick, tick. Thirty seconds left for the start.

My last sighting shot before the final is a 9.2. It goes high. I do some rapid math, calculate how much I have to click, do five or six of them, and tell myself: it’s too late, now just execute.

My first shot of the final is a 10.7. I laugh inside.

Suddenly, wonderfully, I am in a perfect zone of calm, stability, balance, breathing. Panic is uninvited. This is who I am now, a child of competitive DNA, a product of neuro-feedback and commando training, a confection of practice, experimentation, courage, desire, will, luck, Gaby, Heinz.

Every drop of sweat shed, every trick tried, every pellet examined, every technical correction made, all of it has come together. I am shooting like a machine, shooting like a man in training. From the time my head tilts down for each shot, Gaby starts counting the seconds. Everytime I fire after precisely the same period. This was rhythm from a dream.

My next six shots are strong.

10.3.

10.4.

10.5.

10.5.

10.5.

10.6.

Gradually, I begin to move in on the leaders. Decimal point after decimal point, shot after shot.

Of course, I do not know this. I can see my score on the monitor before me. But the main scoreboard is behind me.

After the first shot, the 10.7, the standings are:

Hakkinen 608.1.

Zhu 607.2.

Bindra 606.7.

After the third shot, I have already crept into second place:

Hakkinen 628.8.

Bindra 627.4.

Zhu 627.1.

After the fourth shot, I am closer:

Hakkinen 638.8.

Bindra 637.9.

Zhu 637.3.

After the seventh shot, I am in the lead:

Bindra 669.5.

Hakkinen 669.3.

Zhu 668.2.

Boxing hurts, you can see it, the geography of sweaty faces rearranged for a terrible millisecond as glove meets flesh, sweat flying like some painful rain. But shooting hurts, too, only it’s invisible, like some internal medieval torture to the mind.

The anxiety about a mistake is like a scream building inside you, but you cannot let it out, you just stand there like some unmoved monk. It’s unnatural. But the man whose control of emotion is the steadiest, the competitor who doesn’t let disappointment leak into his breathing has the advantage.

I was in control. But for a second I allowed myself to realise I had a chance to win the Olympics. My scores were telling me I was close. I had to be close. A few minutes ago my rifle was faulty I had nothing to lose. Now I was possibly the favourite, I had an Olympic gold to lose.

I couldn’t see the scoreboard, it was behind me, but I kept at it.

I was digging and everything was put aside — life, medal, family, feeling — trying to find the discipline where the only words that echoed in my mind were ‘Next shot, Next shot, Next shot.’

Then, suddenly, in the eighth shot, just a 10.0, like ice water on the face.

Hakkinen was now only .1 behind.

Then, in my ninth shot, I produced a 10.2 and Hakkinen and I were tied.

About 3,700 kilometres away, my family was praying. My sister, in Delhi, had spoken to me the night before. More a case of me saying, ‘I’m sleeping, no talking.’ Then she went to the temple. In Chandigarh, morning had just broken as my mother kept a cellphone to her ear and listened to a friend relay the scores of my qualification and texted them to my sister. The qualifying round wasn’t shown on television, only the final was, so she listened, fingers and toes crossed, as she likes to say. My father had gone to ten gurdwaras the previous day. He dreamed I was standing on the podium; my mother always maintained I would win India’s first gold.

Mother’s instinct, she said. Who dared argue?

But I was somewhere else, in this place of reckoning that athletes eventually come to. This brilliant, terrifying place which you dream of on so many nights. A place where greatness hinges on a single shot, gold on one pull of the finger. A man alone with his future.

I picked up my rifle for one last time, looked at the sight, was aiming slightly to the left, corrected myself and pulled the trigger. Just touched it really. It was over fast. A few seconds.

And it was as close to perfect as you can get.

10.8

I shouted when I saw the score on my monitor before me. I pumped my fist at the score, not victory, because it hadn’t come yet. Hakkinen shot seconds later and had a 9.7.

But had I won? In my mind this wasn’t clear. Gaby flashed me a ‘thumbs up’ for victory, but I misunderstood. I thought she meant a medal. When she hugged me, I was still asking, ‘Did I win?’ I couldn’t see the main scoreboard, I was almost too scared to see the scoreboard. I desperately wanted that effort to be good enough for gold because I couldn’t go deeper.

Then she said: Yes. Gold.

I laughed, and Gaby said, ‘You’re done with shooting. You’ve killed me, you’ve killed yourself?’