Five men, a billion hopes

The trap bird zips off every which way, leaving the shooter milliseconds to process a multitude of factors before he pulls the trigger. Manvjit Singh Sandhu is the man in the hot seat. The great Indian hope in shooting.

Sandhu can afford no distractions and has laid out precise rules for other members of the Indian contingent. He is to be left alone. No one approaches him and no one infringes upon his space. Sandhu is singleminded in his focus.

India’s medal hopes primarily rest on five athletes. Apart from Sandhu, there is Abhinav Bindra — the quiet philosophical son of a meat packer — who was robbed of a medal on account of an uneven floor at Athens. Bindra has banished himself from the spotlight of publicity. His every breath is focussed on getting it right on the big day.

Boxer Akhil Kumar and the veterans Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi comprise the other front-runners. There are other wild cards who may well trump the aces. But as of now, apart from the tennis duo, who are consummate at playing the media, the rest of the primary hopefuls have withdrawn into their shells.

It’s a world of intense pressure, a place where doubt gnaws and the questions of reporters, who have ignored them for so very long, grate all the more. 

Akhil lives the extreme life of a boxer who needs to lose a couple of kilos overnight to fit his mandatory 54kg bantam weigh-in on Friday morning. He has hardly eaten solid food for the last week, subsisting only on protein shakes.

A billion hopes is a burden that’ll break any Atlas. These men lug it stoically, asking only to be left to themselves before they unleash years of toil in precise, controlled legend-making moments. Hopefully.

Sonia’s visits for just over a second
Sonia Gandhi visited the Olympic Village to supposedly partake of the welcoming ceremony for athletes on Thursday. She did not have too much time for our Olympians as an athlete joked that she met them for about “one-and-a-half seconds”. If he does win a medal perhaps politicians will have more time for him, he remarked.