Up until the Paris Olympics, Indian Women’s 50m 3P shooter Sift Kaur Samra always had a get-out-of-jail card in her pocket. She knew that if her prone and kneeling positions weren’t right up there with the best in the world, she could always just rev up the Ferrari that is her standing position scores.
Be it her fifth-placed finish at the World Championships, or the World Record breaking effort at the Hangzhou Asian Games, Samra’s standing blitzkrieg would always soar her over some of the best Olympic shooters in the continent and then the World.
But come Chateauroux, the poor prone and kneeling was followed by an even worse standing performance. Qualification came to a close and one of India’s favourites for a medal (she had won bronze at the Munich World Cup just a month removed) at the Paris Olympics finished a shocking 31st out of 32 shooters.
Samra immediately came back to India and went to a range to put up a score. She needed to know whether it was the rifle that messed up that day or her.
“That was not a score that I really shoot,” said the Faridkot native. Shooting a 10m rifle score back in India, Samra immediately hit a 628.
So it wasn’t the rifle.
“I think it was a social media thing. Because before the Asian Games and other competitions people didn’t know much about the sport. It’s usually after we win a medal that people would talk about us. But this time the talk was before the event and that was a really different thing for me. I was not used to that,” said Samra.
India’s Sift Kaur Samra competes during the Women’s 50m Rifle 3 Positions Team at the Fuyang Yinhu Sports Center during 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023. (AP/PTI)
“Knowing that everyone had their eyes on me had me concerned that I had to win and that was a mistake.”
The 23-year-old was part of a group of Indian shooters who had risen up the ranks in the 50m 3P position and put the country’s shooters as a legitimate force in the event. Samra, Anjum Moudgil and Ashi Chouksey on the women’s side, and Swapnil Kusale, Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar and Akhil Sheoran were all putting up world class scores in the year leading up to the Olympics. While Kusale took a deserved medal, India’s best 3P shooter was left wondering what happened.
When the standing position shots didn’t land dead centre, Samra tried to switch things up. She slowed down the pace of her shots, she left her position and then came back after a rethink, then went through her rifle to see if some adjustments were off, and finally went through her kit to see what was wrong. But no answer appeared and the qualification ended with a promising hope of a medal dashed.
“Even when the prone position went bad, I felt that my standing could have pulled me out of the situation. But then in standing I was just out of the zone.”
Immediately after that disastrous qualification, Samra’s mother was by her side and took no time to deliver a roast to her daughter.
‘Atleast you came second from the bottom’ was the crunching tackle, albeit in jest. ‘Punjabi moms’, explained a resigned Samra. Later the family whisked her off to Paris from Chateauroux for a day to distract her from what happened.
After the high of the Asian Games last year, the 50m 3P shooter had been struggling to replicate similar scores at the start of the year. But then the Munich World Cup results, in a stacked field at that, indicated that she was coming back into form.
“That was about the kit. My kit was changing and it took time for me to adapt to it, which finally happened when I took part in Munich. Our kits usually get less stiff as they’re used, so new kits solve that issue,” said Samra.
Once back in India after the Olympics, she had to attend the trials to make it to the World University Games team. After those trials, she decided to take a month-and-a-half long break and recuperate from that heartbreak and a shoulder injury she had picked up once back in India. She was advised to take the break by her personal coach Deepali Deshpande, who had seen her ward go on a tear participating in numerous domestic and international competitions and then be struck with the curse of ‘It was just a bad day’ — at the Paris Olympics of all places.
