Asian Shooting Championship: Caught unawares by changed format, but Suruchi Phogat and Samrat Rana still manage 10m air rifle mixed team silver

But Phogat and Rana got their thoughts in gear and managed an Asian Championship silver medal on Thursday. And despite that mixed-team medal, both are enduring a mini-storm of sorts.

Phogat, who spent 2025 winning three of the four ISSF World Cups before finishing 12th at the World Championships, admitted that they were taken aback.

“When you are in a playoff for the gold medal, you’re not very scared. But here suddenly I felt like ‘Yeh kya ho gaya’,” she said.

There is a reason for that apprehension. The 19-year-old got into the spotlight by winning three World Cups. But then she faltered at the World Championship.

“When we are winning, it’s easy to not care about your technique. But when results start getting up and down, you have to go through everything that you do and find out what’s going wrong,” Phogat said after Thursday’s medal ceremony.

Great expectations

Other than the World Championships, Phogat won a gold at the World Cup finals as well, and also shot down a junior World record. Hardly sounds like someone going through a bumpy phase in her career, but she has high expectations of herself.

She has no personal coach at present. When she is not training under the national team coaches, her father takes charge.

Her partner Rana, too, is an outlier. He had previously claimed that his father coached him to a World Championship gold medal – only the third won by an Indian after Abhinav Bindra and Rudrankksh Patil.

“He learnt how to shoot by practising at targets in the village,” says Rana. “But because he lived in a village, he never got proper guidance. He didn’t want the same to happen with me.”

The youngster from Karnal, with no friends or family in the stands, would take aim among the eight shooters on the lane and routinely be the last to release his shot. With 18 shots in the final completed, and a significant two-point deficit behind eventual gold medallists Kamalov Mukhammad and Nigina Saidkulova of Uzbekistan, India’s pistol coach Samaresh Jung took a timeout. He had seen something that would need addressing later in training, but had to be called out immediately.

“He told me that I was firing my shot late. After that, I tried to shoot a little quicker,” says Rana. When asked why the shots slowed down initially, he admitted, “I kept waiting for the perfect shot.”

Despite winning a silver in Delhi in a depleted field, both shooters now need to give time to their craft and live up to the lofty expectations they have earned. In a busy year with further domestic trials, and then the Asian Games and the World Championships, it’s the only way to keep improving.