Indian shooter Vijay Kumar’s silver medal at the 2012 London Games was India’s first-ever Olympic medal in a pistol event.
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The Olympics has long been a stage where history is often made. Sometimes, an athlete wins a medal in a sport where nobody expected them to. Take, for example, Abhinav Bindra’s gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At the time, India was not as prolific in the sport as it seems today. Actually, it was Bindra’s gold that set the foundation upon which Indian shooters would build later in the future. For such athletes, however, the pressure is pretty much negligible, as there are no expectations in the first place. However, for the ones that come after, there is the pressure of expectations. Until another Indian shooter manages to clinch a gold medal at The Games, Bindra will always be looked at as the benchmark. Thus, an athlete that would come after Bindra might have done an even better job if they won a medal at the Olympics while shouldering that pressure. That is exactly what Vijay Kumar did at the 2012 London Olympics.
The pressure on Kumar at the time was immense. His contemporaries were all bagging medals in the sport that year, and Kumar also had to be one of the members who have contributed to India’s best Olympic campaign in history so far. Before him, Bindra won the gold in Beijing, and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won the silver in Athens in 2004. In 2012 itself, Gagan Narang won the bronze medal in the individual 10m Air Rifle event. So, the onus was on Kumar to pull up his socks and win a medal for the country.
Kumar’s fascination with the sport had begun at a young age. He was the son of an army man. He himself joined the army in 2001, a few years after the brutal Kargil war. It was then that he took shooting as a serious sport and began training. Kumar was transferred to the Army Marksmanship Unit a couple of years later where he began training professionally under Russian coach Pavel Smirnov.
“I consider myself very fortunate that I got a chance to pursue shooting during my time in the army and got their support to help me excel in the sport which got me to where I am today,” Kumar said.
Success followed shortly after he went professional with the sport. He won a couple of gold medals at the 2006 Commonwealth Games and a bronze at the Asian Games later that year. He was looked at, at the time, as one of the competitors who could maybe bag a medal at the 2008 Olympics. However, Kumar was diagnosed with chickenpox ahead of the tournament, and could not make his debut at The Games that year.
It took him quite a while to fully recover, but he roared onto the international stage. He won the silver at the ISSF World Shooting Championships in 2009. He broke his own Commonwealth Games medal tally in 2010 when he won three gold medals, including both rapid-fire and centerfire pistol singles events. Kumar continued his rich vein of form as he bagged the bronze at the Asian Games and a silver at the 2011 ISSF World Shooting Championships. He was one of the favourites to win a medal going into the 2012 Games, but this time, there was immense pressure.
Kumar did not quite impress in the 10m Air Pistol event but that was expected. It was not really his field of the sport. It was rather the 25m Pistol event that Kumar had his eyes on. The former army man came into his own in the event. He scored an incredible 585 out of 600 in the preliminary phase to qualify for the six-member final rounds. He was placed fourth in the preliminary round. “I had trained for this moment for the past year and a half, ever since the rules changed. This was my strength and I knew I could deliver,” Kumar said.
However, to win a medal, the shooter had to perform even better in the final rounds of the competition. He had started quite positively, but Cuba’s Leuris Pupo surged ahead in his quest for the gold medal and was out of sight eventually. Kumar was guaranteed a medal by the time the sixth round concluded, but he was tied with China’s Ding Feng in second place with 24 points each.
In what was a rather nerve-wracking seventh round, Kumar scored a four compared to Feng’s three to secure the silver. He headed into the final round to face Pupo for the gold medal but just came up short. He was already trailing Pupo by two and with the Cuban scoring four in the decider, Kumar sealed his silver. Kumar might not have won the gold medal, but a silver medal at The Olympics is still an incredibly prestigious achievement, and the nation treated him as a deserving hero at the time.
