GOLDEN EYE
“In Beijing, I needed to win gold. In London, I didn’t need it so badly. Now, in Rio, I need it again, desperately!”
it’s not hard being Abhinav Bindra. He lives in a sprawling farmhouse on the outskirts of Chandigarh. He has access to every imaginable luxury. And he also has an Olympic gold medal—the only one with an individual gold. But it’s also not easy being him. To continuously feed the fire inside. To spend hour upon hour in the shooting range in his back garden. To slow down his heart, quieten his nerves, stop his muscles from flinching, exhale, and press the trigger. And to keep doing it day after day, because nothing else will feed his hunger.
Bindra heads to Rio 2016 as ready as he could be. There is a glint in his eyes that wasn’t so pronounced earlier, and his dry humour surfaces more easily than ever before. He’s been there, done that, failed, recovered, and failed again. He is going to the Olympics calling himself a “medal wannabe” but you get the sense that he has finally started enjoying the pain he has chosen to inflict upon himself by becoming an elite sportsman.
“Here, you try,” Bindra says, handing his rifle soon after his final practice session in India. That’s when you feel the weapon’s weight, its proclivity to shake in your grasp, and how it wills you to lose concentration. You get the first shot off, then the second, and the third. By the fifth shot, the tiny target at the end of the hall is a blur. You eyes are popping out, and as you turn to Bindra, he smiles: “Welcome to my world!” He has to shoot 60 times just to qualify for the final, and can’t afford a single shot outside the innermost ring, which is like a speck from that distance.
On his last day of training in India, before he left for Uzbekistan, on his way to Germany, and then onwards to Rio, Bindra shot a 634.6—better than the world record mark of 633.5 But it was in training, and so it means nothing. If Bindra can do it again in Rio, he will be India’s greatest Olympic sportsman in history by a long distance. And if he doesn’t? Perhaps by a shorter distance then. Yes, it’s not hard being Abhinav Bindra. But it sure isn’t easy.