Paris Olympics shooting: Arjun Babuta, and India’s fourth-place curse

Arjun Babuta missed the Olympic medal with a narrow margin

For 12 shots, Arjun Babuta, the 25-year-old from Fazilka on the India-Pakistan border, could dream of the 10m Air Rifle Olympic gold that Abhinav Bindra had famously won for India at Beijing in 2008. After the first two sets of five shots, he was just 0.8 behind Sheng Lihao of China, the world-record holder.

Then, with the first two shots of the elimination stage, Babuta reeled off scores of 10.6 and 10.8 to close the gap to Sheng to just 0.1. Sheng’s response was chilling. His next three scores were 10.8, 10.9 and 10.9 – the last two being perfect scores. Babuta shot a 9.9 with his (unlucky) 13th attempt, and though he rebounded with scores of 10.6, 10.2 and 10.7 in his next three shots, Sheng had established a near-unassailable lead of two points.

Worse still for Babuta, Croatia’s Miran Maricic had drawn level with him at the end of 16 shots, with Victor Lindgren, Sweden’s world champion, just 0.2 behind. A 10.1 in the next set of two shots pretty much killed off Babuta’s medal hopes, and a 9.5 in the next set saw him bow out in fourth place. Sheng would go on to win gold with an Olympic record score of 252.2.

Babuta was left to reflect on what might have been, much like Bindra himself at Rio in 2016, when he lost an elimination shoot-out to Ukraine’s Serhiy Kulish, who would eventually win silver behind Italy’s Niccolo Campriani. Bindra had held a 0.2 lead over Campriani after two series of three shots, and four rounds of elimination. But half an hour later, it was the Italian with the gold around his neck.

In the women’s 10m Air Rifle, Ramita Jindal was pushing for a minor medal after nine shots, only for a 9.7 to push her right down the field. She bounced back strongly with 10.4 and 10.5 before successive 10.2s put her in a tie with Oceanne Muller, the hometown favourite, after 14 shots. The Frenchwoman summoned up an incredible 10.8 in the shootout, leaving a downcast Ramita to pack her rifle and walk away.

The two results continued the theme of near-misses for India’s rifle-shooters in Chateauroux. In the mixed-team event, Babuta and Ramita had missed out on a spot in the bronze-medal match after Babuta could only shoot 103.9 in his final series. In the women’s event, Elavenil Valarivan had shot brilliantly for 57 of her 60 shots to almost assure herself of a place in the final, before scores of 10.1, 9.8 and 10.3 dropped her all the way from fourth to 10th, and outside the eight qualifying spots.

More than 60 years after Milkha Singh in the men’s 400m in Rome and four decades after PT Usha’s near-miss in Los Angeles in the 400m hurdles, fourth place remains Indian Olympic sport’s biggest curse.