Her moment of epiphany came at the most unlikely of places – a beachside resort in Cherai, Kerala.
On a vacation to recover from the Tokyo Olympics shock, Manu Bhaker was in her room all by herself while her family was out sightseeing. “Suddenly, I found myself standing in front of a blank, white wall holding a kettle filled with water,” Manu laughs.
It’s what shooters call holding practice – to test the stability and strength of their arm. “That was the time when I was like, ‘I am getting restless, I really need to get back’.”
For 25 days until that moment, Manu hadn’t even looked at her pistol. Shocked and shaken by her debut Olympics, where she couldn’t make a single final – “one of the very sour memories of my life,” she says – Manu was convinced she was ‘done’.
But when she felt desperation, holding a kettle brimming with water was the sign, she took the first flight back to Delhi and was back at the range.
It’s taken a while, three years to be exact, but on Saturday Manu took her first step towards redemption. With a scintillating qualifying round where she shot a total of 580, two less than topper Veronika Major from Hungary, the shooter described by her coach Jaspal Rana as a ‘generational talent’ ensured she’ll have a shot at an Olympic medal for the first time in her career.
The podium still isn’t in her sight — Manu’s record in the 10m air pistol final is, at best, iffy — but figuring in the top 8 and reaching the final marks an improvement, however minor it may be.
India’s Manu Bhaker reacts during the 10m air pistol women’s qualification round at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 27, 2024, in Chateauroux, France. (AP/PTI)
And it also lifted the despair that gripped the Indian shooting team on a gloomy day in Chateauroux. The mixed air rifle teams fell short of expectations.
These teams showed a brave face and masked their disappointment with a smile, but deep down there must have been a disconcerting sense of a repeat of Tokyo
Olympics all over again — back then, luck eluded India similarly as the shooters returned empty-handed.
‘Sour memories for life’
Manu has lived that pain for the last three years.
“Tokyo is one of the very sour memories of my life,” she repeats. “I was not confident in Tokyo. I had doubts about myself, and my ability to win, I was putting pressure on myself to win – that feeling that somehow, I had to win. That became my only goal and I missed out on so much. I wasn’t enjoying myself, I had cut out everything.”
She created a bubble around herself and ensured ‘nobody entered it’. “I was so scared to talk to people also. I was trying to cut myself off from everyone,” she adds. Then, Covid happened and like others, she says, the pandemic ‘changed her as a person’ — the initial impact was she got restless.
“When the Olympics came, I was like ‘Let’s just get through this somehow; let’s just get through this somehow’.” She recalls standing on the firing point and forcing her shots — shooters in their firing positions are taught to be like monks, and this was the opposite of that. There was a weapon failure and shot groupings that looked like rangolis. Manu’s first Olympic outing was everything opposite of what she imagined.
To discover how much she still liked the sport, Manu first had to stay away from it. And after that moment of realisation, she began from scratch — starting from
the junior tournaments. “Earlier, in all competitions, I had shot under a certain amount of pressure and expectations to win. But there, I didn’t give a damn how I performed, didn’t give a damn how I shot. I just wanted to shoot. Bad, good whatever… that was refreshing.”
On Saturday, the Manu that walked onto the range was different to the one that was in Tokyo — here, she was confident, relaxed and happy. It may or may not translate into a medal. But Manu isn’t obsessing over it either.
“You have to be brave enough to face (these situations). You can’t be mar mar ke, dar dar ke, jaise taise kar loon. Bhagwan bas bacha le. You can’t be like that, I should not beg,” she says. “Now my thing is I have to enjoy it, I have to be brave and then the outcome can be the same. I might lose again but that should not matter because I tried.”