Margins

How wide is a coffee bean?

Memes contain multitudes. Now that an opening sentence I’ve been itching to write is out of the way, let me explain. Beyond their obvious comic value and usage as conversational currency, memes are also pop-culture barometers. Anything remotely popular becomes a meme. And that’s just the starting line. Eventually, the more viral a meme, the deeper its subject has penetrated the cultural zeitgeist.

The latest internet sensation is a side-by-side picture of two shooters: Kim Ye-ji from Korea and Yusuf Dikec from Turkey. It has exploded across the internet. My favourite version is this rather accurate description of the contrast between two popular note-taking applications.

Both Kim and Yusuf have been successful at the Paris Olympics. Kim won the silver in the women’s 10-metre air pistol, Yusuf in the mixed team 10-metre air pistol. The hilarity, of course, comes from Yusuf showing up in a loose t-shirt and tracks, without any eye gear or ear protectors, carrying the air of someone woken up from an afternoon nap, and winning an Olympic medal. Next to him, Kim looks like the creation of a first person shooter video game or a Quentin Tarantino movie about silent snipers.

Thanks to their recent spike in popularity, shooting events at the Paris Olympics have caught on the contrails and found some attention. About time too, because shooting is a crazy, extreme, but honest exhibition of the absurdity of Olympic sport.

Allow me to lean on Abhinav Bindra, a man who has experienced each of those shades. During the last week and a half, I have built my ambience for Paris 2024 by picking up Bindra’s autobiography, My Shot at History, once again. His candour and tone, expertly crafted into text by Rohit Brijnath, make for an engaging, easy-to-follow story, even if nothing about his life was normal. Within the first couple of pages itself, Bindra illustrates the world his kind inhabit.

“The bullseye is 0.5 millimetres. When it comes to the bullseye, you can score from 10.0 points to a highest of 10.9. In our world, even hitting the bullseye isn’t enough. We have to hit a particular part of the bullseye, we have to exist on the very edge of perfection. Let me just say this: William Tell with his crossbow had to hit the apple, I have to hit the seed inside the core of that apple. All the time, every shot.”

Every time I think of Bindra, ‘Beijing’ comes as an immediate mental response. Not just as a juicy alliteration, but as the scene of his magnum opus: the Olympic gold medal. Until 11th August, 2008, India hadn’t known the smell of an individual Olympic gold. It had known a lot of team golds in hockey, a fistful of individual bronzes and silvers, World Championships and Commonwealth Games golds, but never this. That day in Beijing, Bindra scaled what had seemed an insurmountable peak.

Until then, it had been a story of starvation. The same pattern of talented athletes walking in with hopeful, twinkling eyes, but leaving with sullen faces, repeated every four years. Bindra is intimately acquainted with that pain too. He begins his book with Athens 2004 - the power cut before the confetti explosion four years later. In that chapter, titled Defeat and Despair in Athens, he neatly unpacks the emotions of an athlete when they have to face the fragility of their Olympic dream.

Forty-seven shooters competed in the qualifying round for the 10-metre air rifle event at Athens. Bindra was in third place, and had set an Olympic record. In his words, “In touching distance of a gold medal, even closer to bronze.” Ten shots later, he was walking away from the range, having finished seventh out of eight finalists. Boom, poof, gone.

That evening at Athens makes Beijing a story of enormous depth and significance.

Like many, I have followed the Paris Olympics with eyes peeled to screens of different shapes and sizes. On most days a monitor, other times a phone, and on a couple of rainswept evenings this week, a tiny TV at a ninety-year-old cafe in Galle. It’s been on. And I’m here to tell you that watching a shooting final is a nerve-wracking experience. On most days, I am jealous of an athlete’s skill and fitness, but while watching shooting, or even archery, I get extremely jealous of their composure and poise.

The rules of a shooting final are simple: a first set of shots, called Stage 1, followed by rounds of two-shot eliminations.

After twenty shots in the women’s 10-metre air pistol final, there were three shooters left: Manu Bhaker, Kim Ye-ji - yes, her, and Oh Ye-jin, also from Korea. Manu was in the bronze medal spot. After the twenty-first shot, Manu was 0.1 ahead of Kim Ye-ji, looking good for top two. Manu’s next shot was an excellent 10.3. Kim had to shoot 10.4 and above to stay in the contest and eliminate Manu. Silver nailed, you’d think. Kim shot, and the scoreboard flashed 10.5. Over. The camera then cut to Manu’s face, and there was a wry smile that exhibited a simple emotion that, one imagines, every athlete knows deeply: what *do* you do? A hair’s breadth inside the bullseye was the difference between a bronze and a guaranteed silver (maybe even gold, who knows).

A day after, Arjun Babuta was standing at the same range, shooting in the 10-metre air rifle final. After twelve shots, Arjun was in the silver medal spot, with a 0.1 gap ahead. After sixteen, the gap had increased but he was still second. We could see the contours of a medal forming. Four shots later, it would go up in smoke. Arjun was out of the competition in fourth place. The gold and bronze medallists shot twice outside the bullseye each through the entire final; the silver medallist once. Eighteen of Arjun Babuta’s twenty shots in the final landed within the bullseye. The difference was two-fold: how far within or outside the bullseye, and most importantly, when did the less perfect shots come.

Archery has different margins, but just as unforgiving. India’s Dhiraj Bommadevara participated in the men’s singles event. In his pre-quarter final match, he hit the bullseye in 10 of his 16 shots. His opponent, Eric Peters, hit the bullseye in his last seven shots, and eventually won over Dhiraj because his final shot was closer to the centre by the breadth of a coffee bean.

How do you reconcile in such a crushing moment? Unlike other sports where a “bad day” can be used as an olive branch, there's no such luxury in disciplines like this. Arjun and Dhiraj performed brilliantly, yet their brilliance was eclipsed by others.

“Rona dhona toh hai he hai (Crying is par for the course)… How I wish I shot that one shot better! Eventually, I have to move on. Today, I’ll indulge my thoughts, whatever they may be. I am fighting with my thoughts right now. Did I give my 100 per cent? I did. So was it luck? Is there a blind spot in my technique? Or is there any other aspect which I don’t know now?” - Arjun Babuta at the mixed zone after his final.

Abhinav Bindra has been in Paris, and was quick to offer support to Arjun. Having contemplated retirement after his own Athens ordeal, Bindra understood the weight of what Arjun must be experiencing. All that work and preparation, years of manic, obsessive grind, washed away by millimetres.

Sports like cricket, football, and tennis offer a lenient rhythm that way. When Carlos Alcaraz cramped out of the French Open final in 2023, we knew that he would have another shot at a Grand Slam in a month. Sadness hit us like a freight train when India lost the 2023 Men’s ODI World Cup final, but there was a big tournament just around the corner. A footballer has a Champions League, a league, and a bunch of other tournaments to aim for every year. No matter what the margin, there’s always a chance at redemption tomorrow.

An Olympic athlete’s life runs in metronomic four-year spells. For nearly 1500 days, they wake up and sleep to the same internal hymn. The Commonwealth Games and World Championships, while significant, prestigious, and worth celebrating, are rehearsals for the grand spectacle. There is no safety net, no guarantee of a second chance in the spotlight.

“My only chance comes every four years. My only chance is seventy shots in 125 minutes every four years. We have to be a little insane to do this, a trifle obsessive, almost as single-minded as shaven monks who sit for years meditating under trees in search of distant nirvana.” - Bindra, in My Shot at History

Three years ago, Manu Bhaker entered the Tokyo Olympics as a nineteen-year-old rising star, with a trophy cabinet already overflowing with medals. Nine ISSF World Cup golds, a Commonwealth Games gold,  and two Asian Shooting Championships golds pointed at a clear medal contender. At Tokyo, she finished 12th in the 10 metre air pistol event, and 15th in the 25-metre pistol. A malfunctioning gun shattered her dreams, leaving her and the entire shooting contingent, who had come in as favourites for multiple medals but were leaving empty handed, under a harsh spotlight. The disappointment was profound; the loss of confidence and will, even more so.

So, when, at Châteauroux, her nineteenth shot in the final - a 10.1 - practically confirms a bronze medal, it’s the falling into place of the same pieces that had refused to sit together the last time she was shooting around the five rings. Arjun, Dhiraj, Ramita Jindal, and Elavenil Valarivan will be hurting beyond comprehension, but hopefully, with time, they can look at Manu Bhaker and Abhinav Bindra’s stories and find some inspiration for another shot, however distant the bullseye may seem.

I write this a few hours before Manu’s 25-metre pistol final. It’s her chance for an unprecedented third individual Olympic medal. Only PV Sindhu and Sushil Kumar stand alongside her with two. When you factor in that she’s 22, and might have three in the same Games, it makes you giddy. And yet, for all her rhythm and skill, she will walk into the blue shooting range knowing that those hopes dangle on an edge as wide as a pencil.

The Olympics is unique and unmatched as a piece of dramatic material. The finest athletes in the world converge, each battling for their dreams in their own way. Some with a gun, others with a bow, some with their hands chopping through water, others running like the wind, finishing a 200-metre race in the time it takes me to type this sentence. It is indeed a celebration of human potential, a showcase of athletic prowess pushed to its absolute limits. Yet, beneath that veneer of glory, it’s just as much an antithesis.

A lot of it is a dance of marrying fate with skill, and sometimes finding them impossible to distinguish. For all your excellence as a performing artist, can you summon your absolute best when the walls are closing in? Knowing that a gram of extra pressure on your front right deltoid, or a coffee bean’s breadth, can decide between despair and ecstasy? What a weird, wild life to live; and what a weird, wild life to choose.