In 72 hours, Manu Bhaker matched what it took India 44 years to do — winning two bronze medals

In 44 years and 10 Olympic Games between wrestler KD Jadhav’s bronze in 1952 and tennis doubles specialist Leander Paes’ third-place finish in 1996, India won just two individual medals — both bronze.

Manu Bhaker needed just three days to do the same at the Paris Olympics.

The shooter, who sprang onto the scene as a teenage prodigy and flirted with greatness only to be held back by repeated instances of stagefright, joined the league of Indian legends on Tuesday. Or maybe, Manu Bhaker will be considered to be in a league of her own.

With a bronze in the 10m air pistol mixed team match while partnering Sarabjot Singh, on the back of an individual medal in the same event, Manu Bhaker became the first athlete from the country, since independence, to win two medals at the same Olympics.

On Tuesday, Manu Bhaker and Sarabjot, two 22-year-olds from Haryana, combined to stun South Korea’s Lee Wonho and Oh Ye Jin 16-10 in the bronze medal playoff.

Manu Bhaker might not be done yet. On August 2, Manu Bhaker will return to the shooting ranges in Chateauroux to begin her quest for an unprecedented hat-trick of medals. She will lead India’s hopes in the qualifying round of the 25m pistol, a pet event according to her.

The euphoria over her second medal hadn’t dissipated but Manu Bhaker was already training her guns on the next one.
“I hadn’t hoped I’d win two medals in a single Olympics. Any athlete who starts playing dreams about competing at the Olympics and winning a medal for India. Yeh ussi sapne ka tukda hai. Pehla tukda bag mein hai (This is a piece of that dream. The first piece is in the bag),” she said in a measured tone, holding her medal. “There’s one more match to go, so I am looking forward to it.”

Recovering from shaky start

Manu Bhaker and Sarabjot recovered from a shaky start, with Manu holding fort with precise shooting when her partner was overcome with nerves initially — another moment of sweet redemption as fingers were pointed at her poor scores for the mixed team’s failure at the Tokyo Olympics.

The enormity of Manu’s feat can’t be overstated enough.

Sportspersons spend most of their entire life, living and training in isolation, and putting themselves through an enormous grind in the hope that someday, they stand on the Olympic podium at least once.

With an air of casualness, Manu Bhaker has won two in the space of 72 hours.

This is even more significant for a country like India, whose fortunes at the Olympics have always ebbed, with more stories of disappointments than success and where athletes have become legends for ‘nearly’ winning an Olympic medal.

Significance of the past 16 years

The last 16 years have been revolutionary. In 2008, shooter Abhinav Bindra’s gold medal in Beijing taught the rest of India to believe. Wrestler Sushil Kumar then showed that it is possible to win a medal not just in one but back-to-back Olympics, opening the doors for the likes of badminton star PV Sindhu who treaded the same path. Javelin ace Neeraj Chopra’s gold, the country’s first-ever medal in track and field, was a lesson in dominance and nonchalance.

Now, Manu Bhaker is writing a new chapter.

Born to a merchant navy father, Ramkrishna, and mother Sumedha, a former school principal, Manu — a political science graduate and a student of public administration — was keen on a career in boxing, inspired by Mary Kom’s bronze medal at the London Olympics.

Dabbled in tennis and kabaddi

Growing up in Jhajjar, she even dabbled in tennis and kabaddi, and even trained in thang-ta, a martial art, before Ramkrishna took her to a shooting range. She was 14 at the time, and there has been no looking back since.

Indian marksman Jaspal Rana, a former world championship and Asian Games champion, took the teenager under his wings and transformed her into a champion shooter within a couple of years. By the time Manu turned 16, she was a Commonwealth Games gold medallist and a Youth Olympics champion.

She, however, never lived up to her initial promise. A familiar frailty crept into her game wherever she competed: to stutter in pressure situations on the big stage. This ‘habit’ would haunt her at the Tokyo Olympics.

Her entire sporting career, Manu Bhaker dreamt of being at the Games. When she was finally there, it turned into her worst nightmare. She couldn’t qualify for the finals of either of the three events and had a bitter falling out with Rana. The two patched up last year — Manu went against the advice of most in her inner circle — and she re-emerged as a different, more confident shooter.

The Tokyo Games, Manu said, gave her a sense of how ‘special’ Olympics are — ‘so many people watch it’ — and she returned with a new-found respect for ‘athletes like Neeraj, Sindhu’. “I always looked up to them… they have been able to prove themselves at a certain level,” she said.

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She credited her turnaround to a wide range of people supporting her — from the coach and her family to the ‘support staff, the chef, cleaners, house staff, people who help on the range, guards who take care of us when we are sleeping…’. “(These medals are a result of) so many people’s hard work. I can’t claim this medal just for myself,” she added.

The journey continues, she says. On Friday, she will be back at the range with compatriot Esha Singh in another event where Indians are expected to do well. But said the two medals won’t distract her. “I’ll put my head down and carry on. I will try my best. Let’s see how I can perform,” she said. “(But) I hope the love stays, you know. I hope people are not disappointed or anything.”

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