Talk of emotional characters in Indian sport and Jaspal Rana is right
up there with Leander Paes. Even as the 30-year-old Delhi shooter
wept after shooting a golden treble in Doha, friends were pulling
his leg: "Jassu, you have a career in Bollywood once your shooting
career is over." Rana shot back: “My career is far from
over and there is a lot more gold and glitter to come.” As Rana
proved in Doha, he may not be the latest, but he is still the greatest.
As an 18-year-old, when Rana gunned gold in an event called standard
pistol at the junior World Shooting championship in Italy, he did
not exactly have sports lovers craning their necks to catch a glimpse
of him.
Within a few months when he returned from Hiroshima in 1994 after
a golden hunt at the Asian Games, he was a superstar, showered with
such epithets as ‘James Bond’ and ‘boy with nerves
of steel’.
However, the years between 2002 and 2006, were the toughest of
his life, he says.
He returned from the 2002 Busan Asian Games without a medal, something
that was unthinkable for a champion of his calibre. Those were trying
times, when critics said Rana was over the hill, he had become too
fat, and it was the next generation of shooting stars — Anjali
Bhagwat, RVS Rathore, Abhinav Bindra and Samresh Jung — that
was going to call the shots.
“I know that many people had written me off. But training
in Dehradun with my father, I knew I would get my rhythm back,”
says Rana.
And rhythm is the soul of shooting. A shooter actually squeezes
the trigger between two heartbeats. And Jaspal’s control and
knowing when exactly he has to pull the trigger, separates him from
the rest.
For someone who has won 23 gold medals and one silver in three
editions of the SAF Games, eight gold, four silver and two bronze
medals at the Commonwealth Games, besides four golds, two silvers
and one bronze at the Asian Games, life has come full circle. There’s
talk that his father, a former MLA, wants him to contest the elections.
Will that disturb his skills with the pistol?
The answer is no.
--S Kannan
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