Skeet shooter Angad Vir Singh Bajwa’s quest for perfection has landed him a ticket to his maiden Olympics. In the latest Firstpost Profiles, he opens up on his traumatising obsession with shooting and the many challenges that define his sport.
Precision and perfection are often interchangeable at the shooting range, although one is often a result of the other’s pursuit. Rifle and pistol shooters fret over decimals. A perfect 10 is not perfect unless it is a 10.9; hitting a bull’s eye is not enough unless you hit the bull’s eye of the bull’s eye. The silent, sanitised theatre of indoor ranges gives sports shooting its distinct charm and an aura of incredulity.
Fascinating for some, unflattering for others. “Honestly, I find rifle and pistol shooting quite boring,” chuckles Angad Vir Singh Bajwa from Italy. “It’s not my type. It doesn’t feel like a real sport. I don’t want to be too hard on my pistol and rifle colleagues, but that’s what I feel.”
What excites the 25-year-old, apart from his Berreta DT11, are Mercedes and Manchester United. He also likes Drake and Punjabi pop, but those are mostly to get his energy going along with his morning espresso.
Bajwa’s world, simply put, revolves around his shotgun and its 30-inch barrel “that comes with a carbon fibre front rib.” He loves to talk skeet. He rattles off gun parts before you can catch your breath. He explains his art with the sincerity of a scientist and ardour of an artist. And somewhere in between, drops an ultimate benchmark of Punjabi love (pardon the stereotyping) – “If you offer me a Lamborghini and cartridges of the same price, I’ll have cartridges.” Those who know, know.
Bajwa fiddled with pistol shooting in his teens, but by the time he reached adulthood, epiphany dawned. The inherent stoicism of pistol events, he realised, was not for him.
“Pistol shooting felt like an art, and I must concede, it is not easy. It is like painting. But, standing at one place all day was not my thing. I didn’t love it. Then I went to the shotgun range and I found it to be really dynamic. There was a lot more body movement, there were moving targets. It felt a lot more challenging. Skeet is also the toughest shotgun discipline, so it was a challenge and I love challenges.
“Skeet is a bit different from rifle and pistol events in the sense that the former are very precision-oriented disciplines. Here, it is more about pointability. We don’t really seek perfection,” he says.
While trap shooters may have their opinion on the toughest shotgun event bit, there’s no denying the fact that skeet presents an exhaustive longlist of challenges. For starters, the competitors have to go through qualification rounds spread across 2-3 days, where each shooter pulls the trigger 125 times across five series and from eight shooting stations arranged in a semi-circle. The top six qualify for the finals, where they shoot 60 targets.
“It is difficult to maintain focus for that long. Rifle and pistol events get over in an hour, but we have to sleep over a good or a bad score. It is never easy. You have to maintain the same level and routine every day. You can’t change too many things. You can’t get super excited or super sad. You have to stay in the competition mode not just through the rounds but throughout the day, and it is not easy. There is no respite. At the end of the match, you are dead tired. Sometimes, I feel I have run 20 kilometres, but all I have done is stand at a place and moved the trigger,” he explains.
It may not be a perfection-seeking pursuit, but perfect scores do exist. In 2018, at the Asian Shotgun Championships in Kuwait, Bajwa’s astounding 60/60 sent him to record books, making him only the second Indian skeet shooter after Man Singh to win a continental or world event. He shot another 60/60 next year, this time in New Delhi, to edge out seasoned Mairaj Ahmad Khan to defend his Nationals crown.
Unlikely as it may appear, there also exists a perfect shot as well. It involves a perfect stance, perfect mount, perfect vision, perfect anticipation, leading to a perfect release and resulting in skeet’s equivalent of a 10.9 that breaks the clay disc flying at 110 metres per second into two, leaving a trail of black smoke.
“That is an excellent indicator of form. If a shooter shoots a perfect shot, he knows he/she is in good rhythm. The objective then is to try and repeat those processes in the next shots at each station,” says Bajwa’s coach Jitender Beniwal.
Until a few years back, Bajwa’s obsession with perfection was his way of life. His visualisations were endless and he wanted every shot to break the target. The black plume became a mirage, and the youngster found himself expending his waking hours chasing it. In a sport where a chip on the target suffices, Bajwa’s punishing quest for perfection threatened to be counter-productive.
Coach Beniwal recounts the time when Bajwa, even after shooting excellent scores, would dwell on the missing links. “There was a time when he couldn’t think anything apart from shooting, irrespective of his scores. Even when he was shooting well, he would keep thinking of ways to improve, and if something clicked in his head, he would want to hit the range immediately,” says Beniwal.
Sometimes, troubled by his ceaseless thoughts and multiple hypotheses, he would jump out of his bed at odd hours and start writing intricate technical analyses in a diary. That black notebook has now become a tome. Gradually, pen and paper were replaced by technology, but the thoughts – and the notes – kept coming. Then, one day, he stopped the practice.
“I used to get super confused if I revisited them. If you keep thinking about it over and over again, you will end up confusing yourself. It didn’t work for me, so I keep things simple now,” says Bajwa. Now, all those observations are stored in the complex crevices of his cerebrum.
“If you have had a good performance, your subconscious remembers it. Whatever good you do always stays in the mind, at least for me. I don’t write a lot now, just make some bullet points and stick to them.
“I was really obsessed. I couldn’t think beyond shooting, and it was not healthy. I am quite big on visualisation. In fact, I used to visualise so much that I couldn’t sleep. I would revisit the match point by point, over-analyse. I had to tell myself to stop it and go back to sleep. I had problem sleeping because I would just not stop thinking,” agrees Bajwa, who stays away from Netflix and other streaming platforms because he finds his subconscious shifting to the shooting range while he is left staring blankly at the screen.
He instead prefers long, lonely walks where he submits to his thoughts rather than fight them. “Even here in Italy, I try to walk alone. I like the peace and the solitude. Coming from a boarding school, I am used to be by myself, and I quite like it too. I don’t wrestle my thoughts, and I do think of shooting, Olympics, and life in general, but I won’t call it an unhealthy obsession anymore,” he says.
The new approach has Beniwal’s approval. “See, it is a very draining sport. If you get a perfect shot, well and good. But even if you secure a hit, that’s enough. We don’t get any extra points for a ‘perfect shot’, so obsessing over it serves no purpose. It’s like amateur boxing, where every punch that lands fetches you points, and you don’t really need to knock out the opponent all the time. We still analyse a lot, constantly redraw our plans and think of making Angad better, but he is a lot relaxed shooter now. And when he is relaxed, he doesn’t miss his target.”
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Angad timeline by Shantanu Srivastava
Men’s and mixed skeet debuted at the Olympics in 1968, and has since featured in every edition of the Games. However, it was not until Mairaj Ahmed Khan broke the glass ceiling that India made their skeet debut at the Rio Olympics in 2016. He missed the finals by a whisker after tying with four other shooters with a qualifying score of 121 (out of 125), but a barrier had been broken nevertheless.
Khan has now made it to his second successive Olympics, where he’ll be accompanying Bajwa, 20 years his junior. Interestingly, Khan was Bajwa’s coach when the latter was testing waters in the sport.
Angad Bajwa (left) with Mairaj Ahmad Khan. The duo will be represnting India in men’s individual skeet at the Tokyo Olympics. File image.
“We talk during training sessions and before the competition regarding the range set-up, equipment, and other technical stuff. It is always good to exchange views. We share a very healthy relationship and Angad is a young, dedicated shooter with a good future,” says Khan.
It is a seminal moment in the history of Indian shotgun that has struggled to cash in on the hysteria that Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore’s double trap silver at the Athens Olympics generated in 2004. Much water has flown since Rathore’s day of glory in Greece and the halcyon days of Manavjit Sandhu, Ronjan Sodhi, and Mansher Singh. Trap event itself has been downsized at the Games with double trap dropping out of the Olympics programme.
In Tokyo, India will have no representation in trap despite the country sending a record 15-shooter contingent. Unlike the rifle and pistol categories, shotgun events do not really have a junior structure, and this is often cited as a major reason for the systemic decline of a potential crowd-pulling shooting event.
It is in this context that Bajwa and Khan’s Olympics quota needs to be looked at. Separated by a generation, the two shotgun-wielding shooters represent the past and future – and also the present – of men’s skeet in India.
The sport itself has undergone a sea change since Khan dipped into it in 1998, but what has really caused a tectonic shift in the nature of sport is the increase in target speeds. This has been necessitated, Beniwal says, by the increasing scores, thanks to shooters and equipment getting better.
“The speed of the target is consistently increasing as a natural progression of the game. A lot of people have been achieving perfect scores. When they had 16 shot finals, they were shooting 16 out of 16. Now, we have 60-shot finals, and they’re shooting 60/60,” he says.
What it means is that skeet remains an intense mad dash cloaked in the format of a marathon. High-speed skeet means high-speed, precise motion at the shooting station. On either end of the semi-circle formed by the stations is a house, known as a low house and a high house depending on their respective heights. These houses spit clay targets within three seconds of the shooter calling for them. At some stations, the shooter has to contend with two targets.
Once the target becomes visible, the shooter mounts the gun and shoots. The act of ‘mounting’ involves lifting the gun from around the midriff to the spot just below the shoulder joint. For a target travelling at over 100 metres per second (speeds differ at various ranges, but is generally in a band of 107-110 metres per second), the process of mounting, perceiving, and shooting is conceived in a reaction time of 0.3 seconds. The first shot is fired within a second.
“You may feel we are just standing and shooting, but there are a lot of muscles at work. Your core and obliques are tested, so are your back and leg muscles. We don’t have the luxury to aim; we just look at the target and shoot. Our eye serves as the backsight, the barrel moves with the eye, and the trigger does the rest,” Bajwa explains.
There’s also a small matter of dealing with the recoil of a gun measuring around four kgs. Wrong placement of the butt plate most certainly messes up the shot because that disturbs the eye-barrel alignment. The upper pectoral muscles that extend below the shoulder joint is where the butt of the weapon rests, and the muscle provides the desired cushion to absorb the recoil. A few inches up, and the recoil can potentially dislocate the shoulder blade.
“That is what makes mounting so important. We keep the gun close to the navel, call for the target, and shoot. It is the base of skeet shooting. Unless you master your mounting, you won’t be able to hit the target. It has to become your muscle memory,” says Beniwal.
Bajwa still practices mounting daily for half an hour, “just to make sure my muscle memory remains intact.” Since the targets are in motion, shooters aim about three feet ahead – the act is called lead. This three-foot lead ensures the pellet meets the moving target in its trajectory. Again, this anticipation is built over countless hours of practice and correct gun mount.
“It is important to develop a good gun feel. Like in cricket or tennis, the equipment has to be the extension of an athlete’s body. You have to build a relationship with your weapon,” adds Beniwal.
Then come the external factors. Skeet implores accounting for variables ranging from arcane to absurd – colour of the sky, wind velocity, sunlight, rains, and temperature, not to forget form, fitness, and mindset of the shooter on the given day. Bajwa likens it to golf, given the sheer number of natural conditions that dictate the outcome.
In fact, such is the degree of challenge that only once in the history of skeet at the Olympics has a gold medal been retained. The honour belongs to US’ Vincent Hancock, who stood on top of the podium in 2008 and 2012. More recently, in March 2019, Hancock shot a perfect 125/125 at the World Cup in Acapulco and followed it up with a perfect 60/60 in the final. However, hot streaks like these are rare, and occur to rarer prodigies such as Hancock.
Having briefly trained under him in the US, Bajwa knows what it takes to be a world-beater. “I have trained under many world-class coaches, including Norway’s Tore Brovold, and I have taken the best I could from them. Ultimately, it all comes down to hunting down the flying target.”
“Hard is more valuable than easy, if you’re training to become better and stronger”
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Training sessions with mycoach – Tore Brovold pic.twitter.com/6ANjZF1Ojo— Angad bajwa (@angadvirbajwa) February 6, 2020
On competition days, Bajwa wakes up three hours before the event, meditates, switches on his playlist, finishes his breakfast – “just about full stomach” – and is ready. This routine – boring, repetitive, and anodyne – helps him get into the zone.
“It is a state of being. At times you slip into the zone organically, but sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just don’t get it. The key is the routine. With all my experience, I know what helps me get into the right mindset, so I just repeat it without actually thinking about it.”
A part of his routine also involves checking the weather. Skeet shooters, much like 3P marksmen, hope for a perfect day to kickstart the proceedings. Perfection is also a matter of perception, but in this case, it has to pass clearly defined parameters: Clear day, no fog, no rains, not much wind.
“Problem is, we rarely get such days. Mostly, we get winds and rains, and the competition carries on unless there are thunderstorms. I remember shooting in pouring rain in Finland last year. It was really bad. We have shot in Delhi in June-July when it gets unbearably hot, and then we to go to Russia where you need to have multiple layers of woolens and you can’t feel your hands,” he says.
Beniwal recalls a tournament in Moscow where Indian skeet shooters struggled with the cold. “It was 2-3 degrees. The Russians obviously found it pleasant because they are used to negative temperatures, but our fingers couldn’t feel the trigger.”
Being an outdoor sport means the weather and wind conditions may change during the event as well. A cloud cover may suddenly make way for glorious sunshine, or a sudden gust of wind may alter the trajectory of the clay targets that weigh only 106-110 grammes.
“These are lightweight targets. So when the wind hits them at the top, they go down, and if the wind hits their lower part, they just go in the wind direction at greater speed,” says Beniwal.
“It is like upsetting the flooring or platform of a rifle/pistol shooter. We never get the best weather, and you can’t predict these things, so we train for the worst. If weather or wind conditions change midway, we try not to give too much of a thought and trust the process. If everything goes well, sometimes you get clay targets that don’t break. So you have to be smart with your ammunition and choke decisions. It’s like on a golf course you should know which club you must use,” adds Bajwa.
The semi-circular arrangement of shooting stations means the angle of the target and the distance of the shooter from the house also keep changing. Likewise, some stations offer perfect sunlight, but the glare is too much on others, making goggle selection an art.
“Look, you are trying to execute the same routine at different stations. The lead in terms of vision changes when you change stations. Scientifically, it remains the same, but how a shooter perceives it changes. Then, as you move along the semi-circle, the speed and distance change. You are closer to the target on Station 2 than on Station 4. At Station 7, you feel the targets are coming right at your face, so you have to react faster. If you compare this with Station 5, you’re far ahead and so your distance and angle change. For right eye dominant shooter, it is a different game than for a left eye dominant shooter,” says the coach.
Another trial the Indian shooters face is that of range background. The background at Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range in New Delhi doesn’t have hills, trees, or buildings, providing a pristine blue canvas to shoot against. However, most ranges in Europe have mountains or forests in the backdrop, making it difficult to spot the flying disc. This challenge is mostly taken care of by frequent foreign exposure, giving shooters a feel of different conditions.
“I feel lucky to be training in Italy,” says Bajwa. “This is the home of shotgun shooting, so we have all major ammunition factories here. There’s a range every 50 kilometres, and each range offers a different set of challenges because the topography changes.”
Being in Italy also means that Bajwa has finally managed to get issues in his gun addressed. Not long back, he was having trouble with the stock of his Beretta. The grip and cheekpiece – the portion of the gun on which a shooter’s cheek appears to rest during shooting – were too tight.
The problem first surfaced during last year’s lockdown when Angad gained some muscle. It meant his face became a lot chiselled while his pecs were slightly pumped. “I still wore the same shirt size. It was a clean gain of hardly 2-3 kgs, but it messed up the positioning of the gun. The cheekpiece could not move sideways anymore,” he remembers. Travel restrictions ensured he used the same gun in all competitions till the ISSF Shooting World Cup in the capital earlier this year, and it was not until he moved to Italy that the issue was resolved.
“There were other issues with the stock,” says Beniwal, “but we didn’t go for too many modifications so close to the Olympics. What we did instead is made him lose those 2-3 kgs through more cardio exercises. Now, his gun-fit is what it used to be and he is shooting very well.”
Bajwa is a stickler for fitness and keeps a tab on his macronutrient intake. His body fat percentage doesn’t go beyond 12 percent, but minor muscle gains can still alter the way he shoots. He doesn’t go overboard with push-ups anymore, and trains his arms in moderation.
“Skeet calls for a lot of agility and quick movements. If I start doing too many triceps or bicep curls or a lot of chest exercises, it will change the way I mount the gun. So you have to be very careful with your training. We are used to training the old-school way that basically demands to kill your body each day. You don’t feel the stress immediately, but after a month or so, you realise fatigue setting in. That’s why I put a lot of premium on recovery. Stretching is also a very important aspect of recovery, and I do it every day in the evening and sometimes in the morning. I also have my post and pre-shooting stretching routines,” he says.
Bajwa’s pursuit for perfection has taken a slight detour towards efficiency, but it is a diversion that he is not regretting. He claims to be dreaming of an Olympic medal for eight years now – the time when the allure of shotgun first consumed him – and is determined to make an impression in his maiden foray. From Dera Bassi to Canada, crisscrossing continents and shooting in some of the most challenging ranges in the world, Bajwa’s crazy jet-setting life is ironically calmed by his crazier, frenzied hunt for flying discs, but there is one disc in particular that he really wants to nail. “Olympic medal is a dream, obviously, but I don’t want to hype it too much. World Championships are perhaps the tougher stage, but Olympics come with their own challenges. And, like I said, I love challenges.”
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