How Elavenil’s final two shots let her down in pursuit of gold - The Indian Express

The edge of a coin is barely there. A thin, almost invisible sliver. That was Elavenil Valarivan’s (pronounced Iḻa-vennil Vaḻa-rivan) distance from Asian Games gold on Sunday.

At the end of a thrilling final, in which she led for all but the last two shots, Elavenil needed to score 0.6 more than Japan’s Taichi Hinata. She shot 10.1 and finished on 252.4. Hinata had 253.0. For all the years Elavenil has spent waiting for a big medal at a major Games, it came down to this tiny sliver.

Her first thought after the final shot? “Oh, 0.6. Okay…” Her voice trails off.

Elavenil’s career has often been about being close — close enough to be called India’s next big shooting star, close enough to be ranked No. 1 in the world, close enough to watch others move ahead while she waited for her moment.

Now, finally, she had an Asian Games medal around her neck. Two, actually. A team silver earlier in the day with Sonam Maskar and Vidarsa Vinod, followed by an individual silver.

For someone who was supposed to inherit the shooting revolution the likes of Abhinav Bindra and Gagan Narang helped build in the generation hers, the journey has been unusually long. Narang, now her mentor, won his first Asian Games medals in 2010 — team and individual silvers. Elavenil emerged as one of the young faces expected to carry that generation forward. Instead, she spent years watching the medals go elsewhere.

🥈🇮🇳 HISTORIC SILVER FOR ELAVENIL VALARIVAN!

Elavenil Valarivan wins India’s first individual silver in the Women’s 10m Air Rifle at the Asian Games.pic.twitter.com/0q0GzaI2M1

At the 2018 Asian Games, a rifle malfunction disrupted her campaign. At the Tokyo Olympics, where she arrived as the world No. 1, her form deserted her and she finished 16th in qualification. In Hangzhou three years ago, India’s shooters were collecting medals by the dozen. And Elavenil was not even on the team.

Her coach Neha Chavan remembers 2022 and 2023 as perhaps the toughest stretch. Elavenil had lost considerable weight after suffering from kidney stones, adding a physical challenge to an already difficult period. Though she made the Olympic team again, Elavenil finished 10th in the 10m air rifle qualification, missing the final.

The years in between were not wasted, though. “Those were very important for my consistency over the years,” Elavenil said of those years. The biggest ‘learning’, she says, was being patient.

Those two traits — patience and consistency — are what eventually brought her back. Before Paris, Chavan had seen just how difficult the road had been. Post-Paris, she also saw how stubborn she was to iron out flaws from her game. “If she feels a problem needs to be resolved, you will find her at the range for an entire day,” Chavan says.

One of the things they worked on was the qualification scores. “Trying to figure out what is not letting us go from, you know, 632 to 633, for example,” Chavan adds. On Sunday morning, those sessions helped.

While Sonam and Vidarsa were shooting their qualification, Elavenil sat on her suitcase, her back against a pillar, waiting for her turn. When her own qualification was over, she sat on a chair and opened her diary. She wrote: “I did my absolute best.” Then she ate a banana and walked towards the finals hall.

That was Elavenil all day — calm, smiling, polite, almost understated. Inside the final hall, though, she was anything but passive. The top eight had two each from China, Japan, India and South Korea, comprising Olympic champions and world record holders. Elavenil raced ahead and stayed in the gold-medal race until the last shot. Starting with a 10.9 — a shot that defines perfection in shooting — she was always the first to fire and consistently found the mid-to-high 10s. Until the 18th shot, when she waited an extra second to release the trigger and shot 10.1. That opened up the gold-medal race, and Hinata pipped her at the finish.

“This is my first Games medal at my second Asian Games,” she says. “I was 18 in 2018, and since then I have had great experiences of two Olympics, World Cups and World Championships. It has been very good learning.”

For years, Elavenil had been the young shooter expected to win. Manu Bhaker and others eventually raced past her, turning expectation into medals while Elavenil kept rebuilding. Now she is 27. The prodigy label is long gone.

What remains is a shooter who has learnt to survive the years when the medal doesn’t come. “The first conversation me and my coach were having was that, you know, it’s like eight years since my first Asian Games through my second,” she said. “So I think it was more about being very grateful that I’m getting the opportunity.”

The opportunity finally became a medal. Just not gold. The difference was 0.6 — the edge of a coin.

Over the course of a 18-year-long career, Mihir Vasavda has covered 2010 FIFA World Cup; the London 2012, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 Olympic Games; Asian Games in 2014 and 2022; Commonwealth Games in 2010 and 2018; Hockey World Cups in 2018 and 2023 and the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup. ... Read More