Saurabh Chaudhary navigates career slump, enkindles comeback hopes with best-ever score during Nationals
Saurabh Chaudhary navigates career slump, enkindles comeback hopes with best-ever score during Nationals
Saurabh Chaudhary, one of Indian shooting’s most prodigious talents, says he’s finding his way out of a mystifying career funk. He’s not quite there yet.
The 24-year-old didn’t quite get the result that would have announced his comeback in style on Sunday morning. Competing in the final of the men’s 10m air pistol competition at the 67th National Shooting Championships at the Karni Singh Range, Saurabh started poorly. Although he tried to claw his way back into contention, Saurabh eventually finished fifth.
Despite ending outside the podium, Saurabh didn’t look too sorry for himself. “I’m not sad. How can I be? It’s the first time I’ve made the final of a National Championship since 2021,” he told Sportstar.
If you had told someone in 2021, that is what Saurabh Chaudhary was going to say in four years, there was no way they would have believed it. For one, Saurabh isn’t talking in monosyllables. Back then, Saurabh was the closest to a shooting savant India had seen, with his enormous ability on the range only matched by a notoriously brusque persona outside it.
Just a few months before winning gold at the 2021 Nationals, Saurabh had been India’s best prospect at the Tokyo Olympics. The then 19-year-old had gone into that competition with 12 medals including six gold at the ISSF World Cup under his belt. He had registered an Asian Games record while becoming the youngest Asian Games gold medallist in Jakarta. He seemingly had no fear of the big stage.
The Games themselves didn’t go as well as he had hoped. He topped Olympic qualification in men’s 10m pistol but finished fifth in the final. He further came seventh in the mixed team event with Manu Bhaker. While he didn’t get the result he wanted, Saurabh’s poise was noted by many. Better things were surely around the corner.
But while Manu’s career has been on the upswing since the Tokyo Games, capped by two medals at the Paris Games, Saurabh’s has dramatically collapsed. Saurabh hasn’t even been part of an Indian team since 2022. In what was perhaps his lowest point, Saurabh, who once regularly flirted with the world record — shot a dismal 557/600 in the qualifying round of the 2023 National Games in Goa.
It would have been easy to get confused back then. “I know that something was lacking in what I was doing. I knew I wasn’t shooting well but I didn’t feel that there was something majorly wrong with me. But sometimes, it takes a long time to figure out things and understand what is going wrong in the first place. At that time (in Goa), I was trying something different. It didn’t work for me. During that period (of poor performances), I even changed my pistol before I went back to the one I used to originally use,” he says.
There was no shortage of people who had their own suggestions for him. “A lot of coaches tried to tell me what to do. But I always just went back to Samaresh (Jung) sir. I’ve been working with him since 2018. At that point, even though the results weren’t coming in, I just continued to do what I had always been doing,” he says.
While Saurabh tried to persevere, the results weren’t really coming through.
Even though Manu would call him ‘the best shooter of this generation’ ahead of the selection trials for the Olympic squad for Paris 2024, Saurabh wasn’t one of the six shooters who managed to make the cut.
There were those who argued that Saurabh could have received some sort of wildcard to the trials and even that he should have been part of the national team in some form. Saurabh though understands why that wasn’t the case.
“Even after I left the national team, I never felt that I was treated unfairly. I went on my sponsors’ money to two World Cups (the Rio World Cup and the World Cup in Changwon, South Korea — both in 2023) . But if I was not performing, why should I expect to be picked? I couldn’t feel bad because I wasn’t at that level. I hadn’t earned it. How could I feel bad for not getting something I hadn’t earned?” he asks.
There’s no doubt he earned his place in his drought-breaking appearance in the final of a National Championship. Just earlier this week, he shot a score of 591 in qualification. That was his highest-ever score in any competition and just 3 short of the current World Record.
It’s not just the score that Saurabh is happy with. It’s that he’s finally shooting with confidence once again. “The thing I liked most was the confidence I felt when competing. When you squeeze the trigger, you want to have the confidence that the shot will go where you have fired it. That is the main thing. It’s not like you are shooting just to get it over with or that things are not going where you want them to go. The score has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter if you are shooting high-tens or low-nines. Confidence is something you feel even before your shot hits the target. You want to feel you have shot your best. I think that confidence is coming back now,” he says.
Saurabh says he has been slowly building his confidence. “I started feeling things were getting better at the end of 2023. I took part in two national trials back then and I shot a 581 and 586 in those competitions. I felt as if I was doing the right thing then,” he says.
While Saurabh says he felt good while shooting even during the final, his coach Samaresh knows why the score didn’t reflect it. “He was trying to shoot faster than his natural timing. He was forcing the trigger because he was getting too eager,” he says.
Samaresh isn’t too worried about this. “The finals are not for shooters. They are really for spectators. Saurabh’s shooting well and you can see it from his qualification scores. The finals performance will come. There’s nothing really wrong with him. He never had any real problem with his technique. Technically, there’s not much to change about him. He knows how to sight and how to press the trigger. But he had to find a way to translate that into matches. He’s getting there now,” he says.
According to his coach, while Saurabh might already possess everything he needs as a shooter, to find his form again, he has to hit the brakes on everything he has been doing. “It never seems like a good thing for a shooter to be out of the Indian team. But that was actually the case for Saurabh. The time he was away from shooting for India actually ended up helping him,” he says.
Saurabh agrees with this assessment as well. “Everyone wants to be a part of the India team. But when I was a part of the team, I was constantly competing. I wasn’t really able to practice. I was just focusing on winning somehow. When you are playing one competition after the other, you don’t really get time to practise. I think I needed that break to be able to return to that state,” he says.
But it wasn’t that Saurabh’s turnaround has been because he practises more now. It’s just the opposite. “I must be the only coach who wants their athlete to train less. Saurabh is someone who puts in too many hours in training. One of the things I had to do was to tell him not to train so much. When you overtrain, you burn out. Shooting’s not primarily a physical sport. Your mind needs to relax. On the lane you think about shooting. When you leave, you need to think about something else,” Samaresh says.
This has been difficult to accomplish for Saurabh. “Even now he doesn’t have any other hobbies. He is obsessed with shooting. Whenever he has some free time, he will say, chalo kuch shooting kar lete hain. (Let’s go and shoot),” the coach says.
Over the last year, Saurabh has been forced to reduce his intensity somewhat. Although he has been part of the National Centre of Excellence (NCoE) in New Delhi since 2022, Saurabh has been advised to only spend 15 days of each month there. “I have to tell him not to come to the NCoE and train as much as he does. When he comes here, he is at the hostel 24×7. He is always around people who are shooting. He wakes up and there are shooters around him. When he does breakfast, there are shooters around him. His mind needed a break and for that he needs to go home,” Samaresh says.
According to Samaresh, Saurabh should opt to go home more often although, there too, he has a shooting range built within a cowshed. “When he is at home there are at least 10 other responsibilities. That is important for him to switch off from shooting,” he says. This is of course easier said than done for Saurabh. “I’ve been shooting from a very young age. This is all I really know and care about. It’s hard to be able to pick up something else to do,” he says.
Samaresh doesn’t doubt Saurabh will change. “This version of Saurabh is as good as he was back in 2018 when I started working with him. But now he’s just older and more mature. He is a remarkable shooter. At his best, he was so consistent that it was almost inevitable that he would see a dip. But things are getting better now,” he says.
Saurabh himself is happy just to take things as they come. While he may have shot a career high score, he is neither thinking of bettering it, nor giving much thought to the Olympic cycle that has just begun. “I don’t have any aims or expectations. I just want to focus on my shooting. With time, things are getting better. Despite that, I never thought I deserved to shoot a certain score. I don’t think that way even now. I don’t keep any expectations from myself. I just do what I always do,” he says.
