Rudrankksh Patil copes with pressure, wins Asian Championship gold in 10m air rifle

There is a cost to feeling that you owe excellence and for Patil it came in the form of how his body responded to stress — especially being the World No.1 for three years from 2022. There were times when his hands would start shaking uncontrollably. He would start to panic in certain situations. A step outside of sport was needed and it took him three months but last May, Patil finally started to feel like he could work his way back into becoming the shooter he always thought he was.

“In pressure situations, I am able to fetch something out of it. Today, it was like that. This is something which is my strong point,” said Patil outside the range on Friday. It was a sign that he was getting back to being his old self.

A few minutes later to another question, he replied, “The goal is to be India’s youngest two-time World Champion.” And then immediately admits, “Main easily bol raha hun, but itna easy nahi hai.” (It is easier said than done).

This has been the dichotomy of one of India’s most prodigious talents in recent years. A desire to become a great in a sport which captured the country’s imagination when Abhinav Bindra won an Olympic gold medal at the Beijing Games in 2008, but also feeling the trappings of it on his body.

For a long time, he didn’t even admit to himself that the stress being felt was real, or was something that was tangible to his sport. Then a conversation with the Indian high-performance director changed things.

“If you ask our high performance director, he will tell you the lowest ever recovery score recorded was mine. He had never seen one so low in any sport,” Patil had said to The Indian Express ahead of the World Championship last year. “The difficult part was relating to the sport as stress free. I think it took me three months just to start loving shooting again.”

For Patil, the path to being great goes through having to manage the stress he feels. One of the solutions that the Maharashtra shooter’s team came up with was to limit his competitions. If one World Cup’s scores are enough to keep him in line for selection trials, there is no need to go to another World Cup.

The other solution was to spread out his competitions. Since the pressure of being great was divided over two events, Patil started to compete in 50m 3P competitions last year. Within months, he had picked it up enough that he was eighth in Indian rankings.

At these Asian Championships, he will be part of the mixed team event next and then take part in his first-ever international 50m 3P event. Taking the pressure of winning a gold out of the way by participating in another competition and giving yourself another chance, has been the call to action.

There are still areas that he needs to focus on, the chief of them being his qualification scores. Patil has started to pick a habit of either scoring in the high 103s or low 104s, and then instantly jumping to the high 106s when the pressure is on. On Friday, he top scored qualification with a 632.1 score but it needed a monster 107.1 effort in his sixth and final series.

Once in the final though, most other shooters were in Patil’s world. Arjun Babuta (fifth at the Paris Olympics), who finished second in the event on Friday, said it best: ‘Losing to Rudrankksh is a compliment’.