Asian Games 2023 medals tally | With 18 medals so far, Indian shooters are stealing the show

Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar (above) joined Esha Singh as the Indian athlete with the most medals when he bagged his fourth, the silver medal in the 50m Rifle 3 Positions. (Image source: X/@narendramodi)

Friday began for India at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, the way most days have started since the Games kicked off five days ago—with a handful of medals in shooting. To start proceedings, the Indian women’s 10m Air Pistol shooters won the Team silver in qualification, with 17-year-old Palak Gulia and 18-year-old Esha Singh leading the way, along with Divya Thadigol Subbaraju. Then the two teenage pistol shooters went head-to-head, and Palak, making her debut at a major multisport event, showed complete command over her nerves as she led the field from early on and kept the lead with an iron grasp, relaxed shooting and an inscrutable gaze. Time after time, Palak shot 10-plus scores, taking her time, unbothered by her surroundings or what her opponents were doing.

This is a girl who knew little about the sport when the previous edition of the Asian Games (2018, Jakarta) was going on. She had watched Indian shooters do well at that Games, and impressed by this new, shiny, sport, chose it as her compulsory game at her Gurgaon school. She has been a revelation ever since. And to think all this happened because Palak’s father decided that girls have no future in their village in Haryana’s Jhajjar district, and shifted to Gurgaon to give his daughter a better chance at living life on her own terms.

Silver medallist Esha Singh, who now boasts four medals at this Asian Games, the biggest haul so far by a single athlete, was already making waves when Palak first picked up a gun. Esha was just 13 when she won her first national championships in 2018, beating established names like Heena Sidhu and rising stars like Manu Bhaker. Esha took up shooting after her rally driver father, Sachin Singh, tried to get his daughter to take an interest in sports—she tried go-karting, badminton, tennis and skating, but it was the shooting range at the Gachibowli stadium near her home in Hyderabad that really pulled her in. Her father also built her a practice range at home, before she began training in earnest at the Gun for Glory Academy run by former Olympic medallist Gagan Narang in Pune.

A couple of hours later at the range in Hangzhou, rifle shooter Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar joined Esha as the Indian athlete with most medals when he bagged his fourth, the silver medal in the 50m Rifle 3 Positions, where he was pipped only by local favourite Du Linshu, who smashed the Games record on way to gold. Aishwary and his teammates had notched up a world record score in qualifying to win the Team gold earlier in the day.

These medals on Friday brings India’s shooting medal tally to 18, with a few more events to go in the next couple of days. This is historic. It is the most shooting medals ever won by India at the Asian Games, surpassing the 14 won in 2006 in Doha handily. It is also the first 1-2 in a shooting event, and the first gold in 50m 3 Positions, the most demanding of the rifle events, and one in which India has had little presence in its shooting history.

“This, arguably, is the most prized moment in Asian Games for India till now!” former rifle shooter Olympian turned coach Joydeep Karmakar posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday when Sift Kaur Samra, a 22-year-old shooter from Faridkot in Punjab, bagged the 50m Rilfe 3 Positions gold. “@SiftSamra PB (personal best), National Record, World Record, Asian Record, maiden Asian Games appearance and individual gold…”

And yes, you probably guessed it, Sift and Co had bagged the Team silver earlier too. While teenager Ashi Chauksey won the bronze in the individual event to give India two athletes on the podium. Thursday was also when Esha bagged her 25m pistol individual medal, and, along with Manu Bhaker, the team gold; the men’s 10m Air Pistol team won gold (17-year-old Shiva Narwal was on that team, while his brother Manish was winning the gold at the Para Shooting World Championships in Lima, some 17,000km away); and Anant Jeet Singh Naruka brought in the men’s skeet silver and team bronze.

“The consistency is amazing to see,” said pistol coach Samresh Jung, “None of our shooters look fazed by the stage, or by the competition. So many of them are at their first ever Asian Games, but you would not be able to tell. They have shown great mental strength.”

Sift, who gave up on trying to be a doctor to follow her shooting dreams, took the pioneering medal in her stride. “It feels good,” she said, “I did not know I had broken the world record, I came to know that later from my coach... When I left my MBBS course, I was taking a big risk, but my family was behind me; they said, 'You do your work, tum bas goli chalao!’”

What does this big medal haul mean for shooting in India? Does it augur well for the Olympics that’s now less than a year away?

Remember that Indian shooters did really well at the 2018 Asian Games, too, and went into the Tokyo Olympics as one of the favourites, with multiple shooters ranked among the top 3 in the world, and with unprecedented success in the preceding two years in shooting world cups and world championships. Then came a spectacular implosion as the Indian squad did not go anywhere near a medal in shooting in Tokyo.

There are some reasonable explanations for this—the momentum acquired at the 2018 Asian Games was hampered heavily by two years of the Covid pandemic, and the young shooters did not have the experience or the knowledge to keep things on track during such a trying time. The second big reason is also related to age—the largely teenage shooting team simply got overawed at the biggest stage of their lives, the Olympics. Many of those shooters lost their way.

The most trenchant example is Saurabh Chaudhary. The 2018 Asian Games was his first senior international event, but the then 16-year-old pistol prodigy set the Games record on his way to gold, beating people of the calibre of double Olympic champion Jin Jong Oh. In the next two years, he became world champion, World No.1, amassed a horde of world cup medals, and walked into the Tokyo Olympics 10m air pistol final with a world record score in qualifying. Then, nothing. A tame seventh place finish and a quick fading away from the national circuit too. In the lead up to the 2023 Asian Games, Chaudhary was nowhere on the scene.

Manu Bhaker, too, faced an eerily similar fate at the Tokyo Olympics, but unlike Chaudhary, she has clawed her way back, stayed in contention, got a tattoo quoting a Maya Angelou poem on the nape of her neck (“and still I rise”) and bagged a medal at Hangzhou.

The situation ahead of the Paris Olympics is slightly different. Yes, there is an even bigger crop of young teenagers shooting at world-class levels, which speaks volumes of the environment and culture the sport has built in India in the last decade, but so far, there seems to be no danger of a cataclysmic event derailing the Asian Games momentum en route to Paris.

“We are better than ever before,” said rifle coach Suma Shirur. “Better prepared, better equipped, and with a talent pool that genuinely knows what to do when the pressure of a big event comes down on them.”

The Asian Games shooters will head to the Asian Championships starting October 22 in Changwon, Korea, next, in a bid to qualify for Paris 2024.