Tokyo 2020, shooting: Saurabh Chaudhary, consistency and the complacency of expectations

Saurabh Chaudhary was just 16 years old when he won the Asian Games gold in men’s 10m air pistol, beating a star-studded field on what was his senior international debut. Since then, he has only grown from strength to strength, winning World Cup medals with relative ease and a consistency that almost gave a sense of complacency to Indian sports fans.

So when the youngster, still only 19 and the youngest in the final field, couldn’t win a medal at his first ever Olympic Games, there seemed to be an evident sense of disappointment. The teen finished seventh in the eight-shooter final, just an hour after topping the qualification. There was a definite dissonance between the two performances.

It is not as if he had a bad campaign, he topped the qualification ahead of Olympic champions. This was expected of him, but it came soon after no Indian reached the final of women’s 10m air rifle.

It is not as if his campaign is over, he is yet to play the 10m air pistol mixed team, an event which he has dominated at World Cups with Manu Bhaker.

Yet, in perhaps what is a mark of Indian shooting’s improvement in the last three years, there were expectations of a medal from the first…

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