As thick clouds of smoke, permeating from the Jhajjar power plant on the outskirts of the city, appear from a distance, the retreat from city life to the countryside takes place almost jarringly quickly.
Wide highway roads make way for narrow, makeshift lanes and townships for large pockets of barren land. Where proper roads end and GPS navigation draws a blank. Locations need to be found the old-fashioned way, rolling down windows and relying on the kindness of strangers. The streets are deserted. And village elders head indoors to beat the scorching heat, and for a game of cards and hookah.
It is here, in this quintessentially Haryana village, Sasroli, that the latest sensation in Indian shooting, Suruchi Phogat, began her journey.
Only 19, she has been a standout performer both at home, and globally. At her very first ISSF World Cup, in Buenos Aires, she won gold in the women’s 10m pistol event. She followed it up at the next two, in Lima and Munich, to make it three titles on the trot. In Lima, she pipped Manu Bhaker, double-medallist at the 2024 Paris Olympics, to the top step of the podium.
Domestically, too, she’s been turning heads, winning the National Championships, National Games gold and topping the selection trials earlier this week.
Jetsetting international sporting champion she may be, but Suruchi feels most at ease in Sasroli. “Whenever I have to take a flight, I wish that I could just close my eyes and reach where I need to go. Flying is not fun for me,” she quips. “It’s nice to be back home.”
Her recent achievements underline positive trends for shooting. It has made sure that, just like in the previous three Olympic cycles, another promising teenage shooter has emerged. The fact that it is not an anomaly – that the latest world-beater comes in a category where India already has an incumbent Olympic medallist – speaks to the robust systems and deep domestic pool India has in this discipline.
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Suruchi Phogat trains at the make shift range that her family built for her in the backyard of their home in Sasroli village, Jhajjar. (Express photo by Anil Sharma)
It may take a village to raise a medal-winner but, in this case, it was the painstaking efforts of one family.
Suruchi’s father, Inder Singh, had dabbled in wrestling and cross-country running during his time as a havildar in the army. He had been driven to push his children into sports. Initially, he was inspired by his neighbour – someone he described “like a brother” – wrestler Virender Singh, who won gold at the 2005 Deaflympics and whose life inspired the acclaimed 2014 documentary, ‘Goonga Pehelwan’.
But an early injury, which saw Suruchi break her collarbone, made the family rethink their choice of sport. And once Inder gathered more awareness about sports shooting, he was convinced. “We took her to the local akhada for training in wrestling. Everyone around wanted that to be the sport she pursued seriously. If she was not going to do that, I wanted her to compete in an individual sport, but one that is totally fair in competition,” Inder said.
Inder eventually found the right place for Suruchi’s early training. The catch was that the academy was in Bhiwani, better known as the nursery for Haryana’s burgeoning boxers, being the hometown of Olympic bronze-medallist Vijender Sing
But the enthusiastic coach, Suresh Singh, and the good facility at the Guru Dronacharya Shooting Academy convinced Inder to make the daily journey of around 60 km, taking Suruchi along in a train from the nearby Jharli railway station to Bhiwani.
“The father-daughter duo were away every day for six to seven hours,” Suruchi’s mother, Sudesh, says. She was the one who had to hold the fort at home, raising her younger son, Nishant, and working on their fields in Sasroli. “But we would do it again if we had to,” she adds.
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About 15 km away from Sasroli is the village of Goria, on the outskirts of Jhajjar that borders the city from the other end of town. Goria is the hometown of Manu Bhaker, who became the first Indian female shooter to win an Olympic medal last year — and the first Indian to win two medals in one Olympics.
That two of India’s best young shooters grew up about half an hour away from each other, competed in the same category, and even trained under the same coach in their early years, is not an uncommon twist of fate.
Haryana, for decades, has been a conveyor belt of world-class athletes across sports. It’s an amalgamation of many things — hefty incentives, state government policies and a genuine sporting culture where every village has a Virender Singh who inspired a Suruchi.
Despite the robust culture, shooting’s rise in Haryana is a relatively new trend, especially considering that the entire region does not have a single state-sponsored shooting range.
“The growth has happened thanks to private ranges,” Suresh Singh, Suruchi’s coach who worked with a teenage Manu, says. “As an ex-Armyman, I opened this range several years ago. Back then there were a few like me, who invested money in facilities and offered training. With time, many of the local shooters did not go on to become international-level athletes, so they opened academies. Today, quite a few are open all over the state.”
Suresh says the traits that attracted Inder to shooting are the same that motivate many of the other parents he interacts with, which is why the sport is picking up in the state. But without a government-run range, there is unlikely to be much involvement of shooters at the school level, which will keep much of Haryana’s sports-inclined youth away from the big costs involved in this increasingly technical discipline.
“If a kid is expected to travel to Delhi or Dehradun for competitions, and has to afford an academy or build private ranges, naturally, not many will take up this game,” he says.
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Recently, ahead of her third successive World Cup in Munich last month, Suruchi sent a message to her coach back home. He believes it indicates exactly what explains her quick rise as one of India’s top shooting stars.
Shooter Suruchi Phogat with her family at her residence in Jhajjar,Haryana .(Express Photo by Anil Sharma.)
“She told me she had seen one girl hit 99. She responded that she will not score less than 98. When I tried to tell her not to put so much pressure on herself, she said that anything less than 98 would not be acceptable to her,” Suresh says, adding that while technique can be taught and focus can be instilled, this level-headedness and self-belief cannot.
Having worked with both Suruchi and Manu, the coach has often been asked to talk about their similarities. But he insists that there are very few. “Manu is a total sportsperson. She took up all kinds of sports in school and her mentality is that of a competitive athlete. You can tell by the way she works on her fitness,” he says.
But Suruchi, he says, has just taken to shooting naturally. There is very little else that distracts or attracts her. “Maybe, since she is new to it all, that competitive and athletic side of her will come out soon. But at the moment, she just enjoys her game. The hours she spends at the range are a result of all the discipline her parents have put in her. But she does not see it as being hard work. She enjoys it,” the coach adds.
She confirms her coach’s perception of her, as a straight shooter in more ways than one when she is asked about competing with and being compared to Manu, failing to go into fawning praise or showing a lack of respect.
“I have always just found it easier not to care who I am competing against, whether it is at practice, national or international. I am now going to the national (trials) and the only thing I have in mind is meeting my own target. I have played in Dehradun before so I’m even more sure of what I need to do,” she said a few days before travelling to the Uttarakhand capital and topping the trial.
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Every time Suruchi returns from an international competition, the entire family travels from Sasroli to New Delhi to welcome her back. That includes her younger brother, Nishant, who has begun accompanying her to the range and has designs to become a shooter himself.
Her mother says it became a happy ritual recently. “We are just happy when she returns,” she says in front of the makeshift practice range, with paper targets, that her father made for her during the COVID lockdown.
“We have invested everything we have in her. Not just money. But we don’t want her to feel like anything changes because of that, she likes to come home because things are the same here as they were when she was growing up.”
When asked how they manage to create that environment, her mother comes up with an amusing example: “We ask her to milk the cows!”
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