Manu Bhaker to test her preparation at Asian Championships

Bengaluru: Indian shooters will have their task cut out this season as the Asian Games, World Championships -- along with Olympic quota spots -- are slated among the key events.

Thankfully, they will have an early chance in the year to test their efficiency as a strong team of 24 senior shooters, including pistol star Manu Bhaker, will compete at their home turf at the Asian Rifle/ Pistol Championships in New Delhi from February 4. 

The team was picked on merit as the best of Indian shooting squared off in the selection trials, which also takes into account the past performances at international events as well, to show their preparedness for the season ahead.

With the inter-competition done, the focus now shifts to the biggest shooting star and double Paris Olympics medallist Manu Bhaker, who had very few individual medals (10m pistol silver at the Cairo World Cup being the biggest) to her name after the highs of 2024. The 23-year-old Haryana girl, however, is brimming with confidence, seeing the opportunity in the upcoming event in front of the home crowd.

“The end goal for me surely remains the 2028 Olympics,” said Manu during a virtual interaction with select media outlets. “With major events in play, including quota places for the Olympics, I am looking forward to progressive growth, that’s why this competition is crucial in understanding where we stand in terms of shape and technique, and if there are any concerns, we would get time to work on them. So it’s a crucial event in terms of analytics.”

The bigger challenge for Manu would be to peak twice later in the year with the Asian Games (in Japan in September-October) and World Championships (in Qatar in November) being slated back-to-back. The shooter, who has seen several ups and downs in her career, is hoping that a quality training session with her Dronacharya awardee coach Jaspal Rana would help her prepare well.

“It’s not in my hands that I peak as many times as possible in a year so the game plan is always to try my best and focus on what is on my hands because we can’t control everything. That’s why the focus will be on the quality of the training, rest is obviously in the hands of god,” she said.

Looking beyond Manu, India are among the strong nations at the Asian level with giants such as China and South Korea dominating the field. To understand their dominance, China bagged 15 gold while Korea took six at the last Asian Championships in Kazakhstan despite not fielding their strongest squad. India, on the other hand, made the most of the absence by grabbing 14 gold to finish ahead of Korea at second place. 

The likes of Anjum Moudgil, Rhythm Sangwan, Esha Singh among several others will be also be gunning for glory in front of their home fans. The talented 22-year-old Rhythm, who has four World Championships medals to her name (all in team medals, including a gold in 2023), is yet to bag a senior individual medal at the Worlds and may look to change that this year, especially with quota places to be up for grabs.

Rhythm, however, is not getting ahead of herself and focussing on her “process” of one competition at a time.

“My approach is to take it one step at a time,” said Rhythm. “So, currently I’m just focusing on the Asian championship. We’ll see it as we move forward. I just want to focus on my process. I believe that if we stick to it we can achieve the results. As they say ‘focus on the process, and the results will follow’.”

(Asian Rifle/Pistol Championships will be aired Live on FanCode.)