An eye on gold

Sport, any sport, is a spectacle. On display is the athlete's every emotion. Every twitch of the muscle, every groan, the strain of effort, the relief of victory. It's all enacted before us. Honest and real. And that's why we watch.

Yet, when Abhinav Bindra shoots, it doesn't feel the same. There's no drama that unfolds. It's probably the nature of his sport, for shooting is intensely individual. But Bindra takes it to another level - almost hermit-like. His face betrays no emotion. It is as if he is in a trance, a stupor. Completely detached. A man becoming one with his machine, firing shot after shot. No sign of nervous tension. No look of anticipation even when victory seems within grasp. Heck, even his celebration after winning India's first ever individual Olympic gold in Beijing four years ago was subdued. That moment, when he won the 10m air rifle event, was probably India's finest in sporting history. Yet, it involved no bare-chested shirt-twirling bravado. No brutal, guttural war cries, no chest-thumping runs around the arena. No tears. Just a clenched fist and a smile that revealed nothing about his state of mind.

That's Abhinav Bindra for you, India's ace shooter. Distant and impassive.

But don't let the nonchalance or that shrug of the shoulder fool you. There's a fierce competitor, an obsessively driven man inside that seemingly clumsy body. A man for whom, sometimes, even a gold medal is not good enough.

Earlier this month, the 29-year-old won a gold at the Asian Shooting Championship in Doha. In an interview with tabla! soon after, his reaction was: "This win doesn't help me in any way but this success certainly doesn't hurt me. I think I am shooting well. It's just that I can't transplant success in Doha into success in London 2012. I can't take the shots I fired in Doha to London. I have to shoot them in London."

And that is his focus at the moment. The London Olympics 2012, which begins on July 27. He claims there is lots more that needs to be done before a medal at London or a berth in the final can be thought about. "The Olympics will be very difficult. If it was easy, anybody would win it. I have to keep improving. I have to shoot perfect scores, every time," he tells tabla!.

This fastidiousness, where everything short of perfection is no good, this impetus that comes from somewhere deep within, really makes him the champion that he is. It's the reason why shooting, which began as a 13-year-old boy's hobby and fascination for guns, became an obsession. The reason the defeat at Athens Olympic Games of 2004, where he finished seventh, rankled. Why he spent the next four years putting his body through gruelling hours of training. His mind through every test in concentration and focus. And tried everything possible, if it meant improving his score by a millimetre or even a micrometre. It helped that he had the backing of his family, owners of a multi-crore business, to indulge his every whim.

He tried dry firing in a dark room. Took to meditating in samadhi tanks, which are like floatation capsules with no light. Drank yak milk because someone told him it improves concentration. He punched holes in the jacket he wears during competitions, to make it fit better. Tried lipo-dissolve, injections taken to break down fat, to get rid of his love handles. He got himself neuro-analysed. He replicated the pine wood flooring of the Beijing shooting arena at his range at home near Chandigarh. Had two different German coaches whose approach to training was as different as Rahul Dravid's and Virender Sehwag's is to batting. Hired a marriage hall in Chandigarh and converted it into a range, to help him in spatial awareness. Tried commando training. And fired shot after shot after shot for days and months.

All this he reveals in his autobiography A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold, written together with The Straits Times columnist Rohit Brijnath, which releases in Singapore on Feb 5.

Today, he is a different man. The Olympic gold is won, framed and hung on the wall. He has come out of a phase following the win where he wanted to quit shooting. And he claims he is not experimenting as much this time in the build-up to the London Olympics.

He says: "I am a different person now. More relaxed. Not experimenting as much as I did in those years prior to Beijing. That was a different phase and I needed all of that. It is a different phase now. It's just a different outlook and a different mindset that I am in. I don't feel the need to experiment to that level and try out too many different things at this moment. After Beijing, I didn't shoot for a year. I started again in 2010. That was the big change. Over a period of time your mind changes, you change. It's about being flexible enough to incorporate training that suits my current state of mind."

He trains about nine hours every day, which involves four to five hours of shooting and two hours of exercise. It also involves two hours of mental training, which he does through hypnosis, a new aspect to his daily regime.

"Hypnosis is something that I have incorporated in my training. It is an imagery process, which I sometimes do myself and sometimes through the help of an expert. I do it every day, before and after I shoot," he says.

While these three training facets remain a constant and he insists that the experimentation has reduced, he is still that boy in search of absolute perfection.

That's what took him to Aspire, a sports academy in Doha, soon after his gold in the 10m rifle in the Asian Shooting Championship. The academy boasts a topnotch, swanky medical facility. Bindra was suffering from the flu when he won that gold. But it wasn't the flu that took him there. It was foot mechanics.

"I wanted to get some orthotics made, because I am working on and studying foot mechanics. So I visited the academy to facilitate that process," he says.

Orthotics sit under the feet, like customised insoles for the shoes. Prescribed after a biomechanical assessment, these are used to improve foot function. They support and redistribute pressure through the foot and lower limb. "It'll help in my balance," Bindra says.

This need for perfection, for manoeuvring every body part so that it aids in shooting the perfect score - 10.9, the centre of the bull's eye - is what drives his quest for a second gold. It is a task so difficult that no shooter in Olympic history has done it in an air rifle event.

"I want to win a gold in London 2012. I am not even thinking about the Beijing gold. It is in the past... means nothing to me at the moment. But the idea is not to shoot for a gold. But to shoot every shot well. We have 60 shots in qualification. Each shot is a new shot. It is a new competition. That's the mindset I try to develop," he says.

Bindra will be competing in various events till July. He says it will help him remain in a competitive frame of mind for the Olympics. Shouldn't be difficult for someone who puts his body through extreme tests, who competes with himself, who tries to better perfection every day.