The Hindu : Sport / Shooting : Anjali trains her guns for D-day

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Aug 14, 2004

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Sport - Shooting

Anjali trains her guns for D-day

By Our Special Correspondent

ATHENS, AUG. 13. It was quite unusual. She was literally running away from the media, after the practice session at the magnificent Markopoulo shooting range on Friday morning.

Only one Indian television camera was able to capture that fleeting moment when Anjali Vedpathak Bhagwat jumped into a bus.

The intention to avoid the media was understandable. For the D-day was close. It has been a four-year wait and the 34-year-old Anjali was not willing to have her thoughts disturbed on the penultimate day.

An Olympic medal is the only thing now in her mind as Anjali prepares for her favourite 10-metre air rifle event.

And when the media meets her, the main point of discussion would be about her preparation.

There is absolutely nothing about Anjali that the media has not known, right from her exploits in the Commonwealth Games in Manchester two years ago, when she won four gold medals with world class scores. In fact, in the last four years, between Sydney and Athens, Anjali has not shot a score lower than her Olympic performance.

She has won a World Cup final gold, a World Cup gold, a World Cup final silver, two World Cup silver medals apart from a bronze in the 50-metre three-position event.

She was also crowned the `Champion of Champions' by the ISSF in 2002, when she beat a combined field of men and women rifle medal winners after the World Cup Final in Munich. She was unlucky to miss a medal in the Busan Asian Games by an agonizing 0.1 point margin, when the gold itself was 0.9 point away.

Anjali has beaten everyone who matters in the sport, the world champions, the Olympic champions and anyone who has been in the sport, competing on the world stage, in the last three years.

The question is whether she has gathered enough ammunition on the way to fire the final salvo towards Olympic glory.

Expectations

There are a number of shooters in the current field — the world champion 21-year-old Katerina Kurkova of the Czech Republic, Sonja Pfeilschifter of Germany, Lioubov Galkina (Russia), the Koreans and the Chinese — who are capable of winning the Olympic medal.

She was pretty unlucky not to make the World Championship final two years ago.

But Anjali, only the second Indian woman after P. T. Usha to make an Olympic final, is expected to go a lot further this time.

It is only understandable that the presence of Anjali overshadows the rest, and Suma Shirur, one of the world record holders with a 400 out of 400, must be quite pleased with such a scenario at the moment.

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