Deepali Deshpande, head rifle coach of the Indian shooting team, recalls being surprised by something Divyansh Panwar told her a couple of months ago, ahead of shooting trials for the ISSF World Cup, which starts in New Delhi on Friday. "He confessed he was feeling nervous," recalls Deshpande.
It was unusual because Panwar is known to coaches for his relaxed behaviour in training and ahead of competition. He was only 17 when he earned an Olympic qualification quota in 2019, and would go on to win four World Cup gold medals that year. "Divyansh is one of those shooters who was never very worried before competitions. He's very calm, you almost think that sometimes he's a little too relaxed. But that's how he is. This time, though, he was a little anxious," says Deshpande.
But the nervousness was expected. The shooting trial in January this year was the first in-person competition for India's rifle and pistol team in over a year. The event in Delhi -- the first World Cup of 2021 - will be the team's first official competition since November 2019, when they capped off a unprecedented year with five golds, two silvers and a bronze at the ISSF World Cup final in China.
A lot has changed for Panwar and the rest of the shooting contingent since then. He's added a few centimetres to his already lanky frame, and swapped out his schoolboy hair trim with a Zlatan Ibrahimovic-style top bun. If Pistol shooter Abhishek Verma has lost a few kilos, his teammate in the pistol event and four-time world cup winner Saurabh Chaudhary appears to have shed his trademark reticence -- a couple of days before the World Cup was to begin, he was seen happily chatting to his compatriots.
Loss of momentum
After a year in which training stopped and then had to restart in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the team is once again looking to see how they measure up amongst their peers in the world. "The main difference that we are seeing is the loss of momentum. When you are in the competition mode, you are always aggressive. You are always looking for your next target. But when there is a sudden break in competitions, suddenly all that built-up momentum goes away. With this competition, we want to see just where we are right now," says Deepak Kumar, who has also qualified for the Olympics.
While the team played some online competitions over Zoom the past year -- India even topped the medal tally of the inaugural Asian Online shooting championships in January this year -- coaches say it doesn't really compare to the challenge of an in-person event. "When you think about it, shooting is entirely an individual sport, ideally your score should depend only on you. So, you'd think that when you are shooting by yourself and competing with others over Zoom, it's the same as a real competition. But, in reality, it's a lot harder to shoot at the same level when you have that competitive pressure and you are in the physical presence of your rivals," says Deshpande.
Changing of guard in women's 10m rifle
The World Cup will also help provide answers to some thorny questions that have grown over the past year and a half. A case in point is the in-house competition in the women's 10m rifle events. India had won its earliest Olympic quota in that event at the 2018 World Championships, courtesy Anjum Moudgil and Apurvi Chandela. The two were undisputedly the best shooters in the country for all of 2019, with Chandela even rising to the top of the world rankings. While younger shooters were snapping at their heels, it had seemed they wouldn't progress fast enough to dethrone Moudgil and Chandela.
That's not so obvious anymore. The two quota winners haven't made the best return from the forced layoff. Both Chandela and Moudgil worked on their fitness over the past year but that ended up forcing a change in posture and equipment that hasn't worked out for them. Over the four trials conducted over January and February, the average scores for Chandela and Moudgil were 625.28 and 625.79 - which were only the 12th and 15th best scores in the country. It was only the fact that they got a 6-point and 3.75-point boost (owing to their world ranking, their world championship medal and fact they won the Olympic quota), that won them a chance to represent India at the World Cup. In contrast, Elavenil Valarivan, who was considered a distant threat just a year and a half ago, shot a world-class average score of 631.57 over four trials to leapfrog to the top of the 10m air rifle hierarchy.
High stress levels
The World Cup isn't just going to pose a challenge for shooters but for coaches too. It's uncertain whether there will be any further World Cup level tournaments until the Olympics, only some 126 days away. "This will be the last time that even us coaches will get to see these shooters perform under actual match conditions. We'll have only this opportunity to find out flaws in their technique and analyse how to fix them. It's one thing to observe this in training and another to do so when they are managing their stress levels too," says Deshpande.
But while dealing with high stress levels might not sound appealing, most members of the Indian shooting teams are looking forward to it. "You know the anxiety levels are building up because suddenly you notice the chit chat in the camp switches from casual talk to very focused on shooting. You feel the butterflies in your stomach like how it is before a major exam. It doesn't sound like a very fun feeling but after so long away from a competition, I was actually missing it," says pistol shooter Abhishek Verma.