Sift Kaur Samra, 22Sport: Shooting (50 m rifle, 3 positions)Achievement: World-record holder—won a gold medal at the Asian Games last yearHow she qualified: Won the Olympic quota at the ISSF World Shooting Championships in 2023, topped the NRAI trials in April-May 2024.preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}In his quest for Olympic gold, Abhinav Bindra drank imported yak milk to improve focus and went to South Africa to get his brain mapped to find ways to reduce stress. Ask Sift Kaur Samra what she does to “keep calm and carry on”, as Gen Z-ers would say, and she replies, “Kuchh bhi nahin karti ma’am (I don’t do anything).” This is no exercise in modesty, just a young woman, who cleared NEET and set her MBBS dream aside to pursue shooting, speaking her mind. “Main baatein bahut karti hoon (I talk a lot),” says Samra. “I’m a really chill person. That only helps me. I don’t go that deep. Khush raho, game achchhi rahegi (Stay happy and the game will be good).” Khush in Sift’s world means spending time with friends, dancing, listening to Punjabi artists like Diljit Dosanjh, Amrinder Gill, Arjan Dhillon and Karan Aujla, sleeping and driving around in her Scorpio as she did from Punjab to Bhopal for the national trials in April. This easygoing approach is also why most believe she could well breeze her way to Olympic glory to become India’s first female shooter to win a medal.In many ways, Sift is living up to her name, which in Punjabi means “praise”, of which she has been earning a lot. She took to the rifle at 16 in Faridkot, Punjab, starting with 10m before switching to 50m a few years later. It wasn’t long before she was hitting targets and rising up the ranks. “The podium, the feeling of a medal is what made me stick to shooting,” says Samra. That, and the desire “to roam the world”. The triathlon of shooting competitions, the 50m event sees shooters aim for targets in three positions—prone, kneeling and standing. Longer than other events, it is taxing with a change in uniform after rounds, and demands consistency and mental fortitude of a higher level. Under such challenging circumstances, Samra differs from many by keeping tabs on the scores after each shot. “I need to know where I am standing,” she says. “If you don’t know where you have to reach, then there’s no point in working so hard. For me, it works.”Come Paris and she doesn’t intend to change her tactics. Her way of approaching a grand stage like the Olympics is to treat it like any other competition and do what she does in training, which is to shoot well. “My mother said ‘now you don’t have to play for us because people have expectations of me but for the country’,” she says. “I don’t keep expectations as a person.”Shooting has been India’s Achilles heel in the past few Olympics. With the country sending its biggest contingent with 21 shooters, there are 27 medals up for grabs. At least a handful of them are expected to deliver. Talking on Olympic-bound pistol shooter Vijayveer Sidhu’s phone at a camp in Europe, Sift hopes that not only she but also her teammates break the medal drought in shooting since the 2012 London Olympics.- EndsPublished By: Aditya Mohan WigPublished On: Jul 19, 2024Must Watch
