In sport of small margins, Divyansh Singh Panwar’s big leap-Sports News , Firstpost

It was a song from an Emraan Hashmi movie. That much Divyansh Singh Panwar is certain of, even if he cannot recollect exactly which one.

The moment Panwar vaulted himself into the Tokyo Olympics — with a silver medal at the Beijing Shooting World Cup in April 2019 — keeping his thoughts company was a Bollywood song.

Panwar was not even 17 then. He was competing in his second senior World Cup and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Hungary’s Peter Sidi, China’s Zicheng Hui, South Korea’s Taeyun Nam, Russians Grigorii Shamakov and Vladimir Maslennikov — some veritable giants of the sport, while others were promising marksmen in their own right.

The precise discipline of 10m air rifle demands contemplative poise from shooters on the firing point. But the high-pitched soundtrack of wailing vuvuzelas being blown by the home fans that enveloped the Beijing Shooting Range Hall on that day was making it difficult to maintain any sort of poise.

So Panwar started singing in his head.

“I was listening to that song on loop that morning. When I started shooting, that song was playing in my mind. I didn’t even realise when the medal came!” Panwar told Firstpost in 2019 during the Lakshya Cup in Mumbai.

Panwar calls 2019 as the best year of his career. Was it better than his expectations?

“There was no expectation. At all!” he confessed. In just over two years, Panwar has gone from having no expectations to being an Olympic medal contender, speeding past milestones — medal at the ISSF World Cup, World No 1 rank, Golden Target Award — like they’re signs on an express highway rather than indicators of progress.

When the Tokyo Olympics start later this month, expectations off young shooters like Panwar, still a teenager, will be inescapable. In a sport where success is determined by fractions — a 10.9 is more perfect than a 10.8 after all — shooters like Panwar have grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years.

Potential has never been in short supply in Indian shooting. But nerves, the pressure of expectations and the feeling of being overawed by the grandeur of an Olympic Games have derailed many an Indian athlete’s Olympic dream.

Try telling that to this batch of gun-toting youngsters heading to Tokyo with a spring in their step.

“Olympics main jaana hai aur khelna hai. Wohi shooters toh aayenge wahaan pe. (I just want to go to the Games and compete. It’ll be the same shooters that we compete against in other events),” Panwar had told Firstpost in 2019.

“We call him a monster. No matter how much the pressure, he’s able to keep his calm and stick to his technique,” said Indian team’s rifle coach Suma Shirur, who knows a thing or two about pressure.

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Panwar was on the roof of his house flying kites seven Januarys ago when his father, Ashok, told him that he would take him along to watch shooting the next day.

Panwar was expecting to be taken to a “movie shoot featuring Aishwarya Rai or Salman Khan”. Instead, he found himself at a shooting range, where he saw the sport for the first time. The loud shotgun bangs became Divyansh’s first memory of the sport.

“I loved the shotgun initially!” recollected Divyansh. “Then we went to a 10m air rifle range and saw a competition. I loved that even more!”

The next day, his father bought him his first rifle.

As a youngster, Divyansh admitted, not much would catch his fancy. “Dilchaspi toh kisi cheez main nahi thi,” he admitted during the 2019 Lakshya Cup.

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When Panwar heads to Tokyo from Croatia, a compact edition of the Bhagawad Gita will be in his rifle case jostling for space with his rifles and other shooting paraphernalia. In all likelihood, given the commotion of being at an Olympic Games, the tome will remain unopened in Tokyo. But for the teenager, it will serve as a reminder each time he opens his rifle case that he needs to focus on the process of shooting rather than getting weighed down by thinking about the result.

The tiny Bhagawad Gita has found a place in Divyansh Singh Panwar’s rifle case. Image courtesy: Deepak Kumar Dubey

“The idea is to remind him of the line from Gita, ‘Karm kar, phal ki chinta mat kar,’” said Panwar’s personal coach, Deepak Kumar Dubey. “You can see Mahabharata episodes on YouTube too if you wanted. But when you’re getting ready to shoot, be it for training or competition, this book will act as a visual reminder of the mantra that he needs to focus on his process and his shooting.”

Panwar’s fascination for Mahabharata and Bhagawad Gita were born during the days of the lockdown in March last year.

When India enforced a lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, Dubey had the brainwave of having a bootcamp at his Faridabad home for shooters of his academy, Tapasya Shooting Sports Academy.

When the country went into lockdown in March last year, Divyansh Panwar trained at Deepak Kumar Dubey’s residence in Faridabad. Image courtesy: Deepak Kumar Dubey

In the early days of that bootcamp, Panwar and four other young shooters would do holding sessions while facing a wall (It was a while before Dubey set up a makeshift 10m air rifle range in the house where the target was placed inside a closet in another room while the shooters would take aim from a different room.) In those days, breaking the monotony of training were mythological tales.

“We’d take a break from holding sessions in the morning to watch Ramayana on Doordarshan. In the evenings, we would take a break to watch Mahabharata,” said Dubey.

Soon Mahabharata began to dominate aspects of their training as well, with Dubey naming all five shooters after the Pandavas. Panwar obviously was nicknamed after archer extraordinaire, Arjun.

Divyansh Singh Panwar with his personal coach Deepak Kumar Dubey. Image courtesy: Deepak Kumar Dubey

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Those who saw Panwar in the early days, when shooting was just starting to become a serious dilchaspi for him, remember thinking that he didn’t appear to have the right temperament to be a shooter, particularly a rifle shooter. He was too naughty for the discipline. Over the years, he has made experts, and even his coaches, reconsider.

Deepali Deshpande, who has seen Panwar’s growth from close quarters from his junior team days to the senior team now, admitted that initially she didn’t think Panwar had the temperament to be a rifle shooter.

“Sometimes we have preconceived notions in our mind about how a shooter needs to be. This is particularly true in case of rifle shooters. And these are not misplaced ideas, because we ourselves have been rifle shooters for so many years. So, there are general qualities that rifle shooters need to have. More or less, most rifle shooters are like that. Rifle shooters are the most subdued among shooters. Calm. Because our discipline is more precise, it demands that kind of focus,” said Deshpande. “But in a group if there was some mischief happening, then it was likely that Divyansh had a part to play in that.”

Talking to Firstpost from Croatia, where the Indian rifle and pistol shooters have been based for nearly two months now, Deshpande went on to add: “But Divyansh was also hard-working. He would never miss a training session, or other team activities.”

Shirur — who has also coached him first as part of the junior shooting set-up, and now, as the rifle coach of the senior team — remembers thinking how much raw potential Panwar had when he first broke into the junior team.

“He came into the team as a complete raw material. But he had unlimited talent. He was a little more raw than Elavenil (Valarivan),” said Shirur. “In the last few years, Divyansh has grown. He has matured in every way.”

In his junior days, he would often serve notices of his potential. Shirur lets her mind wander to 2018, when Panwar was competing at his first Junior Shooting World Cup in the tiny city of Suhl flanked by the Thuringian Forest. The paths of most Indian rifle and pistol wonderkids at Tokyo Olympics have crossed through this tiny city that is so enamoured by guns that it even has a museum for antique firearms and weapons.

The 2018 Junior World Cup was one where the Indian shooters plundered medals by the fistful.

“We weren’t just winning at Suhl, we were setting junior world records. The mood was so high,” she recollected.

When Panwar finished shooting in the qualification round of an event, he sauntered up to Shirur to ask if he had shot a world record. When she replied in the negative, Panwar shrugged and said “Theek hai, aage karenge!”

Sure enough, Panwar was part of two junior world records at that World Cup: combining with Shahu Mane and Hriday Hazarika for the men’s team 10m air rifle record and then with Valarivan, for the mixed team world junior record.

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Divyansh Singh Panwar shoots at the 2019 Lakshya Cup. Image courtesy: Amit Kamath

The boy with the pencil-thin moustache and short-cropped hair who broke into the junior national team, set world records, then made it to the senior national team, and won a quota for the Olympics looked a lot different from the long-maned, strapping youngster heading to Tokyo.

But each time Panwar takes his position at the firing point, two things have always stood out: his tendency to shoot last among all shooters, and his unique shooting stance. With his feet spaced wider than most other shooters, Panwar tends to arch his spine backwards more noticeably than others. His stance, which looks punishingly painful, was something that stuck out like a sore thumb early on in his career. For Panwar, the posture is also a way of negating his height, which has crept over six feet now (the targets though remain at the same height for everyone).

“2016-17 main position seedhi thi. Phir coach ne kahaa, thoda bend ho jao. Bend hote hote jyaada hi bend ho gaya. (Around 2016 or 2017, my back wasn’t this arched. Then my coach asked me to arch it a little. Before I knew it, it got a little too arched). Then I got comfortable with this shooting stance. Of course, it causes me back pain,” said Panwar.

The shooting posture, Panwar said, was the one thing everyone keeps telling him about, from the layman with no shooting background to India’s only individual gold medallist, Abhinav Bindra.

More specifically, everyone kept telling him shooting like that will cause him spinal problems in the future.

“Everyone has told me about the posture. Har chalta phirta aadmi bol deta hai,” he said. “But until I get to a stage where I have no option but to change it, I will not. I tried tweaking it some time ago at a national camp in 2018. But I wasn’t comfortable in that position.”

Shirur said that before Panwar broke onto the scene, she doesn’t remember any shooter having a stance like his.

“But after him, I’m seeing an increasing number of youngsters with his kind of position. It might look awkward, but look at it scientifically. The posture brought his centre of gravity really low. When’s he in his shooting position, he looks to be of average height. That’s the beauty of his position,” she said before adding: “His position may not fit in the conventional posture, but scientifically I thought it had its own advantage.”

Explaining how he ended up developing that awkward-looking stance, Deshpande said: “When he was younger, he was very thin. Now at least he has some muscle. What happens is when these kids are younger they either don’t have muscles or lack muscle strength. Then they have to take the support of their bone structure. His posture developed from there.

“Initially we tried correcting his posture. But later on, we figured it suits him so well, why change it. We just made sure that he’s protected against any injuries. Now he has built his fitness around that position.”

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While his shooting stance is unique, Panwar’s tendency to have songs playing in his mind as he shoots is not, said Deshpande.

“I used to have songs playing in my head (on the firing point) in my shooting days. Many shooters do this. It gives you a rhythm of sorts. The mind is otherwise always cluttered with thoughts. Songs keep a shooter’s mind vacant,” she said.

With shooters being pernickety about every detail of their craft, this too comes with rules.

“No racy songs,” said Deshpande. “Or you run the risk of pumping up your heartbeat.”

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Talk to any of India’s former shooters who are currently part of the coaching ecosystem and they will tell you that the current generation of shooters — some barely out of their teens — fear no one. Reputations of other shooters standing in the adjoining lanes are not something this particular generation concerns itself with.

“These juniors come with a completely different mindset. There have the post-Bindra mindset,” said Shirur. “They’re not just happy to be there. They’re going into a competition to win. They’re very unhappy on even training days when they don’t shoot their best. Their best is better than the best of the world. Their demands from themselves are way too high.”

On being asked if it plays on his mind when he’s competing against a reigning world champion or an Olympic medallist, he said: “Mujhe is cheez se koi farak nahi padta ki Olympic medal jeeta hai ya nahi. Maine uske jitna score mara hoga qualification main. Isiliye abhi toh who mere bagal main khada hai na! (It doesn’t really matter to me when I’m competing against another shooter what he has done in his career, even if he’s an Olympic medallist. At the end of the day, we must have shot similar scores in qualifying, which is why he’s standing next to me, competing).”