A Shot at History
To my parents and to all the Indian athletes in Olympic sports who dare to dream Preface Prologue: The Quest 1. Defeat and Despair in Athens 2. The Parent Factor 3. The Smell of Gun Oil 4. Nirvana in the Shade 5. The Age of Unreason 6. Leaving My Comfort Zone 7. The Shooting Day: Toilets and Tremors 8. Gunning for Sydney 9. The Grammar of Gunfire 10. Breakthrough and Battles 11. American Hero 12. The Confidence Game 13. A Greek Tragedy 14. Champion of the World 15. The New Shooter 16. The Embrace of Obsession 17. Beijing: Mission Possible 18. The Days After 19. A New Year, a Hard Year 20. Mr Indian Official: Thanks for Nothing 21. Winning and Losing Epilogue: The Quest Never Ends Career at a Glance Index Acknowledgements Photographs Fellow Shooters on Abhinav Bindra About the Authors Copyright by Rohit Brijnath o understand Abhinav Bindra’s uniqueness, to weigh what he achieved, to acknowledge wThere he went, requires a quick glance at history. For over a century, India has chased Olympic gold. Games after Games. Rowers and swimmers. Archers and runners. Boxers and wrestlers. All that dreaming, desire, talent, so much of it beautiful, always coming up short. Gold just refusing to come in an individual sport till it had the smell of a curse about it. Every successive Olympics, the pressure builds, the questions come, the absurdity of it all grows. Burundi had one, as did Luxembourg, the UAE, Hong Kong. Not India. Eventually, the gold medal sits there like a tease. It becomes an insinuation of mediocrity, it corrodes ambitions, it settles like a psychological weight in the athletic mind.
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