From the turmoil of Tokyo, Manu Bhaker extracts the poise for a Paris medal

With a gentle pull of the trigger, the shooter who stormed into the limelight as a 16-year-old prodigy ended India’s dozen year-long wait for an Olympic podium finish in shooting. She won India’s first medal of the Paris Games. She also shot herself into the history books as the country’s first woman shooter to win an Olympic Games medal.

Manu’s instinctive reaction on the firing point was to purse her lips — she had missed out on a potential gold or silver medal by only 0.1 points, meaning her last shot was away from the bull’s-eye by a hairline, allowing South Korea’s Yeji Kim to overtake her.

But within a fraction of a second, the reality dawned upon her that she had the bronze and then, she broke into a big, wide smile that wouldn’t leave her face.

At 22, Manu became India’s fifth Olympic medallist in the sport — the youngest of the lot, and the first since the London Games in 2012, when Gagan Narang and Vijay Kumar medalled.

“Obviously I dreamt about it, but being here, standing with the medal around my neck, it feels surreal. I feel like I’m on top of the world,” Manu said, tightly holding her bronze medal.

This was a high-class field in the final comprising two shooters each from South Korea and China — who had until then swept all gold medals in shooting. In the company of world champions and Olympic medallists, Manu never looked out of place.

India’s Manu Bhaker celebrates with the Indian flag after winning the bronze medal in the 10m air pistol women’s final round at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Sunday, July 28, 2024, in Chateauroux, France. (AP Photo)

Her coach Jaspal Rana, sitting in the stands, teared up and left the finals hall moments after the last shot was fired. Next to him, a dozen or so fans from India created a din. In front of them, the national team coaches and officials hugged and back-slapped each other.

For each of them, the wait for this medal has felt like an eternity.

Shooting has been one of India’s heavily invested sports, which aided in the creation of an incredible pool of players who, for the last decade, won everywhere else but choked at the Olympics.

Manu has been the face of both the good times and the bad. Since coming into the limelight as a 16-year-old after winning the Commonwealth Games gold, her fearlessness embodied India’s rise of the army of Indian teenagers in the sport.

At the same time, she also ended up becoming the face of India’s failure to win a single medal at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago.

PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS – Shooting – 10m Air Pistol Women’s Final – Chateauroux Shooting Centre, Dols, France – July 28, 2024. Manu Bhaker (R) of India in action. (REUTERS/Amr Alfiky)

She was chastised for being the “match ki mujrim” after her low scores pulled the mixed team down the leaderboard; she ran out of the competition hall in tears after being unable to qualify for the final of the 10m air pistol event and, by the end of the disastrous Games, Manu and her coach Jaspal Rana had such a bitter public falling-out that it felt like a promising career had crash-landed just as it was taking off.

After the Tokyo Games, Manu felt like she was “done” with the sport. After a few weeks away, she rekindled her love for shooting and approached Rana again. The duo buried their hatchet and here she was on Sunday, flying off to unchartered territories.

“I believe that if you can’t win something, you should take lessons from it, which, in turn, will help you improve further going forward. If I didn’t have that lesson in my life, maybe I wouldn’t be here today,” Manu said.

India’s medal drought ended — and Manu’s redemption was scripted — in the coolest of fashions.

She had been strutting around the shooting ranges in the army town of Chateauroux, some 300 km from Paris, quietly confident of her chances. And when the time came, she executed her skill with the level of composure not seen from Indian shooters on the big stage in recent years.

Manu was never out of podium positions, and, but for a slight fumble in the middle stages where she dropped points by shooting 9s, she could have finished higher on the podium.

Weirdly, for a shooter whose every action has been scrutinised and was castigated after the Tokyo Olympics, there was no overt display of emotions, nor was she overcome by a sense of relief. There was no time for celebration, too. “I am glad our hard work has paid off. Now, on to the next one,” Rana said.

The coach and ward would retreat into their own world, away from the jubilation outside, and plan for the two other medals that Manu has her eyes on — the 10 m air pistol mixed team event, whose qualification is on Monday, and the 25 m pistol match later in the week.