Commonwealth Games 2018: Monk-like Mehuli Ghosh discovers room for improvement in perfection

“To shoot a 10.9 under pressure during a competition, you have to be like a monk with a rifle. You need the courage of a lion and yet you need to be calm. There has to be a raging aggression inside, but people should not be able to read it by looking at your face.”

Joydeep Karmakar should be flushed with happiness. His 17-year-old protege, Mehuli Ghosh, has emerged from her first Commonwealth Games with a silver medal and a CWG qualifying record to her name. In the finals of the women’s 10m air rifle event, Mehuli was both a ’lion’ and a ‘monk’, shooting a 10.9 — the best score possible off a shot in the discipline — on her last shot to force the 24-shot contest into a winner-takes-all shoot-off. She went on to lose the shoot-off after scoring 9.9 while the winner, Singapore’s Martina Lindsay Veloso, shot a 10.3.

You can gauge just how difficult it is to shoot a 10.9 from a distance of 10 metres by the fact that none of the other seven shooters in Monday’s women’s 10m air rifle event shot the score even once. Veloso came close, shooting 10.8 on her 12th shot. To shoot a 10.9 — achieved by shooting the 10 ring, which is just 0.5mm in diameter — a shooter has to live on the edge of perfection, as India’s only individual gold medallist at the Olympics, Abhinav Bindra wrote in his autobiography A Shot at History.

For a teenager to shoot a 10.9 at an event like the Commonwealth Games with the gold medal dangling on the line is — as Karmakar puts it — crazy.

Yet Karmakar is not quite content with the dull glint of the silver medal.

“She didn’t have any other choice (but to shoot 10.9). At such moments, the adrenaline rush is so much that it is very difficult to contain your emotions and deliver a good shot. But at that moment she kept telling herself ‘it is now or never. This is the shot’. That’s how she shot a 10.9 in the most dramatic way she could have. I have not seen the last shot being a 10.9 in my life. It is the most difficult shot. More so when you’re in a losing position.

“This was definitely a big moment in her life and she fought well. To fight back from the situation she was in — she was almost in the seventh place at one moment — and going to a place where she almost had the gold medal in her hand, was credible. Especially given that she is 17 years old and it was her first Commonwealth Games. It was even more credible that she made it to the final, shot a CWG qualifying record, and returned with a silver. That’s fantastic,” Karmakar told Firstpost hours after Ghosh clinched silver.

“A medal is always special. That, I’m not denying.”

But?

“But technically as a coach, I feel there’s a lot of scope for improvement. I wouldn’t regard it as her best performance. I would not like to say that I am very happy with the result. For me, it is not about the colour of the medal, it is about performance and what she delivers. She was not at her best today. Even in qualification, her performance was not that good. I would like to work on that. I have spoken to her and told her that this is part of the learning process,” he asserts before adding, “For me, as a coach, I cannot think about how she’s just 17. I like to work on a very strict principle. It is not very easy to satisfy me. She knows that and doesn’t hate it. I’m happy with what she did, but I would definitely like to see a better Mehuli.”

On Monday, as the crowd in the gallery at Brisbane’s Belmont Shooting Complex erupted in response to Ghosh shooting a 10.9, Karmakar was bellowing at his television set back in India. He had seen Mehuli, hoodwinked by the adrenaline rush of shooting 10.9 in her final shot into believing that she had won the contest, leaving her gun and other apparatus on the table and leaving her shooting position to walk towards the gallery. She hadn’t realised that the gold medal was now hinging on a shoot-off — one shot to decide who would win.

“She later told me that she didn’t realise the contest was not over. In her mind, it was a 24-shot final and she had just shot her 24th pellet. When she looked at the scoreboard in front of her, she saw that her name was on top of the leaderboard while the Singaporean shooter’s name had dropped down to second. She assumed that she had won. When she shot a 10.9, there was also a huge roar from the crowd in the gallery. Those things led her to believe, in that split second, that she had won.

“In her excitement, she left her rifle and accessories down on the table, and she walked away from her position, which is very difficult to find. Her balance and alignment suffered because of that,” he says.

Shooters fret about stance, balance and alignment. They obsess about the pressure of their trigger, the weight of their bullets and the rhythm of their breathing when in competition. For shooting is a sport of fine margins. Even one of these things going wrong is the difference between a medal and finishing eighth. Karmakar should know. 1.9 points separated him from a bronze at the 50m rifle prone event at the London Olympics.

Walking away from her position was akin to a marathon runner pausing mind-race to tie their shoelaces. With one shot deciding her fate, Ghosh did not manage to regain her balance. She shot a 9.9. Veloso shot 10.3.

“In a short time, she had to go back to her position and get ready. She managed a 9.9, which was not good enough for a gold. But otherwise, a gold was confirmed,” Karmakar laments.

“Before the competition starts, you need to get your stance right and think about your balance and alignment towards the target — all of which takes at least two minutes. Then shooters take a few practice shots, called sighters. You have five minutes for that. She didn’t have anything close to that before that shot. It became obvious that it was almost impossible for her to shoot a good score, and she eventually shot a 9.9, very close to 10.”

But as shooters will often tell you, in their vocation, even a 10 is not good enough.