Nerves take their toll as India go quota-less for third straight day

The mother of all nursed regrets for an Indian sportsperson – that wretched, national trauma turns 30 years this April – is the full-toss Chetan Sharma bowled to Miandad at Sharjah. Once the cursing is done and the nightmarish memory is dusted, were you to rewind a few frames back to the start of the hapless bowler’s run-up, you would know that in that desperate situation, the poor man was aiming for a yorker to cramp the batsman. Some would even say, trying too hard. That it slipped out of what must’ve been sweaty palms and the rest is dark history, tends to take away from what the bowler had nervously planned.

In a quieter corner of Delhi with the Tughlaqabad Fort staring down solemnly at the Karni Singh’s Final ranges, Monday witnessed a similarly public momentary meltdown. Not more than hundred might’ve watched it so Omkar Singh will be spared the agony, but in his almighty attempt to rocket his scores up and get into medal contention and book a Rio berth for the 10m air pistol, the shooter shot a miserable 7.9 (the max is 10.9).

The 7.9 deserves threadbaring given how at one fell swoop, his Olympic dreams went south. Clearly, having started indifferently — he had only three 10s in his 10 shots in the final — and sitting fourth with five rivals in contention for two berths, Omkar went for broke on that shot, throwing in far too much intensity into a shot that he ought to have taken normally. Nerves are devils in this sport.

“At that moment the pressure of expectation got too much,” Omkar would say later. It could be trying too many things, attempting to control every single detail to get a perfect 10-plus or ditching a tested technique for a stunt, a dazzling risk that simply stood no chance of paying off.

Like an ambitious penalty taker in football, who envisions the dream curler to the top right of the net – being too cautious or too clever in order to beat the keeper — and ends up ballooning it over the crossbar, this one was doomed to fail.

There’ve been a few shockers over the last one week, some down to fragile nerves, others seeing the pressure catch up. Elizabeth Susan Koshy had a 7.9 when things got tight, Pooja Ghatkar shot 8.8 just when she was about to leap into Olympic orbit, Md Asab would look at the vividly placed countdown 16 second clock and assume the worst — the final’s death knell — as he dropped some birds and botched a quota. Sania Shaikh would be forced into a shoot-off when after hitting 24 calmly, she would drop the 25th pairing.

Jumping the gun — metaphorically — was in evidence on the three quota-less days for India, when as the thin film of the Rio berth floated in front of the eyes, shooters could not steel their nerve or temper their self-expectation. A moment’s lapse of focus, and you were resigned to the row of chairs from where to watch others script their Rio journeys. Heartbreak and inexperience combining to test the youngster’s mettle.

In Omkar’s case, it was his mental block against the finals format that he has just not made peace with. He had swatted away a fly earlier to record a 10.7, but more or less settled into unfulfilling 9s, never finding rhythm.

The 7.9 sent a tremor through the stands. A colourful, pan-Indian Hindi expletive that can escape your lips when you brake desperately to stop your car from running over a reckless jaywalker, was heard. Hissed in a quiet harsh tone by a gent who’d turned his face away in annoyance, from one corner of the Finals hall, it went scattering to its logical silent end, missing the object of affliction — the 10m air pistol target in Lane D — by a mile.

Neither the shooter, nor the supporter, recovered from that howler, as Singh went out after two indifferent shots of 9.3 and 9.5, exiting the day’s competition and importantly evicted from his Rio dream.

The two gettable quotas went to Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Singh was left self-flagellating about his inadequacies in the finals format – he would confess later that he never warmed up to the time-bound shooting demands of the elimination finals, liking the easy, relaxed pace of qualification from where he could defend a sturdy score rather than start at 0 and go boom-boom before the thudding silence of elimination silenced his resolve.