Asian Games 2018: In a sport of fine margins, Heena Sidhu chases perfection, one shot at a time

Abhinav Bindra, in his autobiography A Shot at History, likens shooting to existing on the edge of perfection.

That is just what the sport is: men and women competing in quiet shooting ranges, chasing perfection.

On any given day, any given time, they look within and try to summon perfection. One shot at a time.

Heena Sidhu understands this. This is why amidst the melancholic tut-tut-tut-tut-tut of pellets and the monotonous routine of raising her gun, aiming and triggering, she stands in shooting ranges trying to be more perfect than the others.

It’s a sport of fine margins. In 10m air pistol, where Sidhu became the World No 1 four years ago, the tenth ring of the target — the inner-most ring shooting in which earns you a score of 10 — measures just 11.5 millimeters. Smaller than a 10 paise coin. In Sidhu’s other event, the 25m pistol event, the tenth ring measures 50 mm. Double the size, in terms of diameter, of an old one rupee coin. This is the perfection Sidhu chases.

It’s why shooters seem to approach their art with the seriousness of a bomb defusal expert. Like their life depends on it. Like there’s no tomorrow.

They obsess over the lighting at the range, the targets, their pellets, their sights, the thickness of their shoes, the rhythm of their breathing and follow-through. Don’t get a shooter started on the importance of follow-through.

In cricket or badminton, you see the elabourate flourish of the bat or the racquet after a shot. The correct follow-through in shooting is staying still for a couple of seconds after a shot. No jerk of the head to look at the score on the monitor, no fist pumps even after a 10.9. Maybe a smile. Maybe not.

It’s why shooters appear finicky or obsessive.

“I wouldn’t use the word finicky. Shooters demand perfection,” says Ronak Pandit, who is Sidhu’s coach and husband. “The margins are so close that when you take a shot from a distance of 35 feet, if your shot is half a millimetre closer to the centre, you could win. Obviously I will try and ensure that every variable is tested and controlled. This quest for perfection makes a shooter come across as demanding or finicky. It’s eventually to aid their performance. So when it comes to lighting or training under similar conditions or tuning their equipment or ensuring the correct ammunition that gets the most accurate results, shooters are demanding. Heena is very, very demanding. Without that, you don’t have a chance of winning.”

Pandit, who won a 25m standard pistol gold medal partnering Samaresh Jung at the 2006 Commonwealth Games and a silver at the Asian Games in the same year in the 25m standard pistol team event with Jung and Jaspal Rana, knows a thing or two about the obsessive nature of the sport and what it takes to succeed. He trained Sidhu to the No 1 spot in the 10m air pistol rankings in 2014, and his protege Shahzar Rizvi currently occupies the throne in the men’s 10m air pistol rankings.

In a sport where the difference between winning and losing is smaller than the size of a 10 paise coin, nothing is left to chance.

External factors like the lighting at a range are studied with the vigour of scientists examining an unusual phenomenon.

“It’s a technical sport, so there are a lot of things that can affect you. If you don’t do the background work, then your performance will fall short somewhere. Shooters first take care of these things like the lighting or the quality of equipment or the range as these are the easiest to do,” says Sidhu.

Easiest is a subjective word.

As Pandit explains, there are two different models of targets. On one of these models, the light is thrown from outside, so the whole target and a little surrounding area gets illuminated. An evenly-lit target. The other model has an LED strip inside the target so the target gets illuminated while the peripheral area is not.

“There’s a lot of imbalance of lighting and when you’re trying to aim, the area becomes a little blurred in case of the second model. If you’re not used to this, it can really unsettle you. You have to get your eyes used to this. There are these irises that you can put on your shooting glasses which can play around with the quantity of light coming into your retina. That’s why to prepare for each competition, we train on similar targets. That’s the first step: getting used to the target. Then we simulate situations and contingencies that are likely to happen during a competition,” says Pandit.

There are, of course, other variables that Sidhu — or any shooter for that matter — takes into consideration before stepping into competition.

“The range could be very small, and there could be a lot of spectators, photographers and journalists sitting very close to the shooting positions. Some ranges are really big, so that even the coaches area is very far away from the shooting position. Nobody makes a big mistake in shooting, they’re all small, subtle things. But when the coach is sitting very far, he will not be able to judge what mistake their shooter is making or if there’s a problem. If the shooter looks back to the coach for feedback, the coach also wouldn’t know because of the distance,” says Pandit.

Despite the homework and the preparations, things can, and will, go wrong at competitions.

It’s why shooters carry spare sights and a spare gun which is calibrated to their main gun. It’s also why you are likely to spot a screw driver on the table next to a shooter’s position.

“We use it (screw driver) to calibrate our sights. Pistol shooters don’t aim at the bulls-eye because it’s black in colour. We aim at the white area just below the bulls-eye. So we’re aiming low, but hitting two to three inches higher. If you are shooting and your shot happens to go to the right of the target, then there are these screws on the gun by which you can adjust the position of the sights to get your shots in the centre. So basically you’re calibrating your barrel so that it is pointing in the centre,” explains Pandit.

But sometimes, a bad shot happens due to a mis-timed breath. Or bad body position borne out of faulty technique. Or a stray thought.

In theory, Sidhu’s job requires her to stand and shoot at an immobile target. Barely any moving, let alone running as you would expect from athletes.

But even standing rock-steady in one position for so long takes more than just practice.

It’s why Sidhu has hired an expert who takes care of her physical stability and another who sharpens her mental skills. It’s also why an average day sees her cram in five hours of shooting, two hours of physical fitness — including cardio, strength training and balance training — and one hour of mental fitness in it.

“When you stand in one position for so long, you’re using certain muscles much more than the others. So there’s no balance in the body,” says Sidhu. “The shooting position is not natural, the human body is not meant to stand. It’s designed to move. So we have to train our bodies to make sure that we are taking care of every little muscle, otherwise stability goes for a toss. You’re relying on your bigger muscles, and not taking care of your small core muscles.

“Initially you may have good scores or good stability, but if you’ve not taken care of the balance of your body, or the stability of your smaller muscles, you’ll see that the body has started showing fatigue and some muscles have become stiffer than the others. When certain muscles are being trained and others are just left alone, this leads to injuries which can be chronic ones. Eventually, it changes the way you stand, the way you walk and even impacts your joints. It can even have an impact on your muscle mass itself — some muscles will hypertrophy, other will become smaller. We need to make sure the body is always supple and in balance,” she adds.

There are also other things that need to be taken care of. Other creases to iron.

In February last year, Sidhu posted an image of Pandit on Twitter, surrounded by notebooks and a laptop.

“This was to just give us a percentage to what works for us and what doesn’t. A lot also depends on your ability on that day. On some days no matter what you do, you’re not getting good results. So we were just trying to factor in those variables and come up with trends,” says Pandit.

He adds that the notes also mention their success rate while trying out different things. The notebooks help the shooter and her coach figure out what things they need to replicate on the day of competition to be perfect. Or at least more perfect than everyone else on the range that day.

“We also look at how much time it takes to prepare for a shot, and how much time it takes to execute a shot, besides breathing times. All these things also give you a lot of information: if you’re taking too long between two shots, it’s possible you’re overthinking or ruminating. We’re not here to write a book on it, but we’re just trying to understand that if you do this we’ll get better results or this is what we should be working on. We’ve been able to work on Heena’s rhythm and her preparation timing for a shot,” he adds.

Sidhu though is mindful of the fact that even her diet can upset her rhythm. It’s why she abstains from drinking coffee or consuming sugar.

“Most of the top athletes don’t eat sugar, because it gives you an insulin rush and you keep craving for sugar again and again. It almost works like a drug, cause it is addictive and it impairs the clarity of your thinking. It increases your heart rate. It’s avoidable. It’s not that I have never eaten sugar, but I avoid it. An ice-cream or a dessert now and then is okay,” she reasons before adding, “I have the same logic for avoiding coffee. It gives you that high and because of it you would want to keep going back to it again. It also increases your heart rate and your blood pressure. As shooters we try to minimise that as much as possible. On top of that it is dehydrating. So it affects your muscles.”

You only need to look at Sidhu’s silver medal-winning performance in the 10m air pistol event at the Commonwealth Games earlier this year to see all of this preparation translating into results. In the finals of the 10m air pistol event, shooters take 12 shoots before the shooter with the lowest score after each second shot gets eliminated.

At Gold Coast, Sidhu found herself staring down the barrel consistently. Always one bad shot away from elimination. After the 10th shot, she was sixth with 95.5 points. But she rose to the occasion, her face a picture of concentration, her demeanour showing no nerves. Her 12th shot was a 10.4, her 14th a 10.3, her 16th a 10.4 and her 18th a 10.3. She won silver.

When success does arrive, Sidhu candidly admits, she is quick to cherish it fleetingly, before moving on.

“If you ask her about her world record score, she may not even remember that,” Pandit jokes before adding, “When it’s done, she just looks ahead and analyses how it could have been better.”

“What he means is that I’m not really attached to her my performances. I’m not even attached to my medals. They’re lying in a drawer. I’m not a person who gets attached to one day or one performance. That has never been the case,” says Sidhu.