CHENNAI: It was a medal eight years in the making! As Heena Sidhu stood beaming after clinching bronze in the women’s 10m air pistol, it was hard to believe that it was her first ever individual Asiad medal. Her previous two, in 2010 and 2014, came in the 10m pistol team and 25m pistol team events. Few would have expected that an athlete with a resume as impressive as hers would have to wait this long to tick that off her bucketlist.
The wait may have been longer than ideal, but Heena is just happy that it’s over. “Yes, this was my third Asian Games and my first individual medal,” she says. “But I feel good. I fought really hard for it. In the final it was going up and down.”Heena had a poor start to the final — at one point, she lay seventh with the medal places seemingly out of reach. But her fightback was impressive. With just three shooters left, a 10.1 would have helped her avoid elimination and take her to a straight shootout for gold, not too much of an ask since the worst of her last three shots was 10.2. But she could only manage a 9.6.
“Standing there, I did not know what was happening,” she says. “That’s how it should be. If you start counting, if you start doing the math, then you get distracted and then it’s very difficult. You just have to think about the next shot and keep doing what you worked on. Just keep your mind on the job and keep your focus on the next shot.”
The Ludhiana shooter’s Asiad bronze follows on the heels of a gold and silver at the Commonwealth Games. She has little time to rest on her laurels — the World Championships in South Korea is just days away.“It has not been easy,” she says. “There were a lot of competitions this year. There were the Commonwealth Games, the Asian Games and now the World Championships. We did two World Cups also, so we had a lot of camps and domestic trials. You have to make sure that you pick and choose your battles. You have to try to stay focussed.”
After medals at two big ticket events, it is only natural that Heena has one eye on the Tokyo Olympics. But the 28-year-old is taking things one shot at a time. “I am not thinking of the (Olympic) quota or a medal,” she says. “I am just focussing on doing my best and that’s all I can do. Just by thinking about the Olympics, you are not going to get the medal.”
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com