A Shot at History-My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold by Abhinav Bindra

A Shot at History-My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold by Abhinav Bindra (AB) with Rohit Brijnath (henceforth referred to as SHOT in this post!).

This is the finest (auto)biography about an Indian sportsman that I have read till date. Admittedly the genre is sparse and my reading in that genre worse. I have only read Prakash Padukone’s profile by Dev Sukumar, all of Gavaskar’s works and parts of the multiple works on Sachin Tendulkar, none of them half as memorable as SHOT.*
SHOT stands out mostly because it gets an extremely difficult part of writing about sports – describing the process of getting to be good. And AB’s winning gold has little to do with enhancing the appeal of SHOT. SHOT does not need anything else beyond its central character to legitimize it.

With my new-found rather perverse need to be paid for spending my time on things, I won’t write a detailed review here, but I will recommend this book strongly for the following reasons.

There is very little material available on Indian athletes becoming World Class. It is another matter altogether that the underlying subject is not vast either! This books dismantles the process – from mental fitness to physical fitness threadbare, much like the protagonist dismantles every part of his gun and gets it customized. AB’s attempts at 3 Olympics till date and a 4th one in the offing are not with much precedent. He is a rare breed, not just for his medal winning heroics but for his ability to go to his 4th Olympics in a row!

AB’s respect for his peers & predecessors– Jaspal Rana, Gagan Narang, Anjali Bhagwat, Samaresh Jung and RR Rathore, among others stands out. He doesn’t idolize them but he treats them with solid respect and on several occasions acknowledges the help/support from each. I particularly liked the fact that he praises Anjali Bhagwat’s performance, especially when he was still young and she was significantly ahead in performance. It is possible that shooting puts the participant in a unique situation where men and women are doing similar tasks with similar weights unlike in other sports where the women typically have lower targets/weights, etc – lower height in hurdles, lighter discs in discus, javelin, shot-put, etc. But the very fact that he treats her like a peer is welcome. Towards the end of SHOT in a certain episode, he clearly uses Saina Nehiwal’s very presence as inspiration.

His love, admiration and dependence on his coaches and experts (and he employs nearly half a dozen of them at various points) – especially Gaby, his shooting coach stands out. I have read fewer books where the contribution of the coach gets such coverage and is as well articulated. Read the chapter titled “A Grammar of Gunfire” and the anxious moments before his final round at Beijing and his coach’s cool conduct under pressure, where what seems like sabotage threatens to derail his journey to a medal for the 2nd time (of course, make sure to read his account of his agonizing Athens experience) for a beautiful description of the same.

AB’s ability to talk about himself and this is where I suspect Brijanth has played his part and get the elusive process of becoming a world champion well laid out is downright fantastic. AB also provide a few laughs and does much to help the reader understand his supposedly stand-offish nature – including his acknowledgment of inspiration from training at the US Olympic Centre in Boulder, Colorado to the 15 year old Bangladeshi prodigious shooter who beats him at a competition#. Mercifully, AB is one sportsman who has a right to be proud and that does come through as never does he betray a sense of not being the best in the world, even when he was yet to be World & Olympic Champion. It is possible that this may be colored by the fact that SHOT was written after the events, but still. One of the several delights of SHOT is peeking into the mind of AB (and he does let the reader do so, wonderfully), as he flits from mischief to nervousness to swagger to depression to love for his family and general agony of failure and relief from success, etc, some of it stretching over a decade, some of it lasting less than a few seconds.

AB’s journey from being a distracted 13 year old with outstanding ability in the sport to being the World Champion in his early 20s is an incredible read.
MUST READ

*As a side-note, if you have other books to recommend, tell me. I did pick up Dhanraj Pillay’s book a few years but couldn’t get past the first few pages. I do intend to read Gopichand’s biography soon

# never mind the fact that AB is himself a child prodigy