Paris Olympics: How going back to Jaspal Rana as coach revived Manu Bhaker’s career

Looking back, a brief call might have just changed Indian shooting’s future course. A call Jaspal Rana never expected. Reaching out to him was Manu Bhaker. It lasted a few minutes during which there was no delving into the past and no holding on to egos — only a cry for help.

And just like that, the now famous athlete-coach pair was reunited.

On Sunday, when Manu entered the finals hall, the first thing she did was to look towards the stand to see where Rana, a former World and Asian Games champion, was seated. He was in the third row to her left, with a stop clock in one hand and shot targets on his phone. During every key moment, she looked towards him.

”I was making sure I was only looking at him and nobody else. Looking at him gives me courage,” Manu said. Rana added: “We communicate through eyes. There’s no need to speak.”

There was a period of more than a year after the Tokyo Olympics when the two didn’t communicate. Their falling out, in full public glare, was so bad that it seemed they had reached a point of no return.

Manu blamed Rana for the shocker she endured in Tokyo. Rana called her immature and mocked her by printing a message sent to him by Manu’s mother on his t-shirt and walked around wearing that at the shooting ranges. The national federation, too, got involved with former president Raninder Singh holding Rana responsible for the entire shooting debacle three years ago.

Manu Bhaker poses with her bronze medal in the 10m air pistol women’s final round at the Paris 2024 Olympics in Chateauroux. She’s India’s first medallist at Paris 2024. (AP Photo)

In the aftermath, Rana went on a sabbatical. And Manu continued to struggle. “I was losing (everywhere) in 2021. Entire 2022, I was struggling. And it continued in the first half of 2023,” she said.

Going back to go forward

At that point, with the Paris Olympics approaching, Manu realised she worked best only with one coach — Rana. She’d been coached by four different people — all national and international champions in their own right. “But I felt Jaspal sir brings out the best in me, builds my confidence,” Manu said.

Manu was advised against it by most of the people in her inner circle. Rana’s straight-talking and no-nonsense approach had led to him developing a reputation of being a ‘rabble rouser’. He had been practically ostracised within the shooting community — his stint as the coach of the junior team was cut short and even at the ranges, few communicated with him.

This, despite the fact that during his tenure as junior coach, several world-class shooters rose to prominence. That included Manu, who was shrewd enough to recognise that if she wanted her shooting career resurrected, there could be no space for egos.

“He lets me be happy. You’ll never see me sulking anymore. And so, the matches also would go well. I am grateful for that because I missed that part of myself in the last two and a half years,” Manu said. “Since we had already worked with each other, he knew what needed to be done to bring me back on the right path. Hence he said it wasn’t difficult.”

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The bad times, Rana said, ‘taught us a lot of things’. Most importantly, they recognised there was no time for petty fights.

Manu calls the reunion with Rana a ‘life-changing’ moment for her. “I feel God sent him for me,” she said. “He does something, maybe magic. He played a huge role in the medal, it’s the sweat and blood of both of us and many more.”

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