In five months, Heena Sidhu went from hopeful to world no.1

As of November 2013, Heena Sidhu had never won a world level competition. She was 24. She was talented. But she was just a hopeful – like thousands of others around the globe. Then she got a call to come and participate in the World Cup final of the 10m Air Pistol event at Munich. She was called because the three shooters in front of her in the qualification line withdrew their participation, one after the other, for personal reasons. Perhaps that is what we call fate. Sidhu’s best finishes in World Cups before the Munich World Cup were two 8th place finishes. She was expected only to make up the numbers. But she took her chance – got her visa and arranged a flight to reach Munich in two days. She got into the final and then beat the reigning World Champion, Zorana Arunovic, 26, from Serbia, in the final face-to-face for the brightest medal, closing the round with a total score of 203.8 points to Arunovic’s 198.6 points. Now, as of April 2014, she is ranked number one in the world. She had little idea of how the call would change her life but sometimes you need just need to take that leap of faith; sometimes you need to try and punch above your weight; sometimes you just need to believe in your talent before anyone else does. “I was always interested in guns from the time I was a child. I just liked guns and the bang of a gun and luckily for me, my family has been in this business; my uncle has a business in guns so we used to have all sorts of pistols and rifles coming home,” said Heena at her Goregaon residence in Mumbai. “He would let me try them from a very young age itself – under supervision of course. But I always loved guns; I loved the bang. However, I was always into studies and I didn’t take up shooting as a sport. I just liked firing a few shots, here and there. In 2006, I decided that I just needed to do some sport and I picked shooting.” [caption id=“attachment_1476087” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Heena Sidhu recently won the Asian Championships as well. [/caption] Now, Heena had other options. A qualified dentist, she could set up a practice and make a lot of money. But for anyone to do anything; to dedicate oneself to something there needs to be a trigger… a point where you realise that this is for you. “I am very competitive. It doesn’t matter what I am doing. Even if I am playing a video game with anybody who is pretty good, I have to win. I will keep at it until I win. In shooting, it was very different. Even today, it is me fighting against myself. It is not someone else who is motivating me or pressing my buttons. “Even all these 3-4 matches that I have played recently, I am not really satisfied with my performance. I feel that I have not reached my potential and the fact that I can feel my potential inside me and I am not there yet, motivates me. That is another sort of competition that I am at – competing against myself, bringing out the best in me. That is what shooting is all about. “I am not here to participate because someone else is beating me or I need to get a particular medal. I am not bothered about the medals or the world rank or the world record. I feel if I can reach my potential which is at least 7-10 point more in qualifying and at least 3-4 points more in the final. And I know it is going to be a long journey to reach there.” Now, shooting is a sport in which you are not concentrating on the “macro movements.” As in there are no big, discernible movements like we see in athletics, football or cricket or any other outdoor sport. It’s all calm on the surface. “In shooting, you have to concentrate on the micro movements; movements that people can’t even see and only the shooter can feel. And even a 1mm movement on your part can land the shot in the 8th ring which really is a disaster for us. Only because of these micro movements people can’t relate to the sport, they don’t understand what is going on… they only see a shooter standing and taking a lot of time just to release that shot. Why is he taking that long, what is he trying to do or what is going on in the shooter’s mind isn’t something that crosses the spectator’s mind. So for the spectator it is very boring. That’s all shooting is about,” said Sidhu. “When you talk about micro movements, you focus is inwards – you are trying to control every little things that is happening within your body. It is not outwards like it is in football where for example you have to focus on your team-mates or the opponents. We don’t have that in shooting. Shooting is all about me, myself and my talent,” she further added. For a long time, Sidhu was shooting in just the 10m air pistol category. But recently, she switched to the 25m event as well… a switch that one might call a cross training of sorts. “It does divide the pressure. But to do the same thing 2-3 times is also tough. If I had done it four years back, it wouldn’t have been a good idea because my basics were not strong. Now, I know what air pistol is about. And on any given day, there is a particular score I will shoot, I won’t go below it. So now, when I take up another event, sometimes, it is complimentary. For example, the trigger action of 25m can help in 10m because it is a much stronger trigger that you have to pull. So when you come back to 10m, a little aggressive triggering helps.” Now, all these changes without supervision can really throw a shooter off. But Sidhu has recruited a veteran Ukrainian coach, Anatolii Piddubnyi, to help her along. A legend of sorts in the shooting circle, Piddubnyi was the coach of the erstwhile USSR team when they dominated world shooting in the 1980s. “The scores put up by the Russians at that time, still stand today so that really shows how strong their techniques and minds were at that time. Today, with all the sports science and advancements we are still not able to match those scores,” said Sidhu. “He is not one of the people who will tell you to shoot 10s and 9s. He is more bothered about how you shoot them and if you are able to repeat it again and again. You need to be consistent. How you pick up your pistol, how you come down, what is your body stability, have you fixed the muscle tone. He breaks everything down into little parts that we can monitor and he makes us work on every aspect. “And I have not seen that with other coaches. They tell you how to shoot a shot in general – like an essay. But they don’t break it down, part by part. It makes it easier and at the end of one year, I realised that my technique was much stronger. So even under pressure when other people collapse… because he has trained my muscle tone so much that my body doesn’t collapse. My heart may be pounding and the pressure may be building up but the muscles stay true. That is what he has taught.” Mentally, Heena is strong and what has perhaps helped her get on even terms with other world class shooters is how quickly she has managed to adapt to the new rules. Under the new rules, everyone starts the final round on the same score while earlier the advantage from the qualifying rounds would carry into the final. “See my coach told me and I told myself… I didn’t like the new rules because it was a big change overnight. The timing had dropped, you start the final round on zero points, and the whole game had changed. But my psychologist, who is from Canada, told me, you can either love it or hate it and rest assured 80 percent of the people are going to hate it. So if you can love it and be the 20 percent then you have already eliminated 80 percent of the competition. So you just hypnotize yourself to like it and I did. I sort of talked to myself. And it was true, 70-80 percent of the shooters who were shooting awesome scores under the old rules… their scores have come down a little in the qualifying rounds and a lot in the finals after the new rules came into effect. So it worked for me.” And it has worked wonderfully well for her. From being a hopeful to becoming the world number one in a space five months is an exceptional achievement but Heena isn’t phased. Not by this or by anything else that the world can throw at me. “At this point, I feel that I am the biggest competition to myself. Because it is not easy to perform after winning so many medals and breaking the records and being the world number 1. I know I am going to be the favourite when I go to any competition. So it is not easy living up to everyone’s expectation and your expectations too. So I think this is another sort of different challenge that I am going to face from this point on. I am not looking at anybody, I am just concentrating on what I am doing. And so far that has been good enough.”