Sitting in his New Delhi hotel room on Sunday morning, Jitu Rai is getting ready to head for the dress rehearsals for the National Sports Awards. He isn't as happy as you would expect from someone about to receive the country's highest sporting honour. The Khel Ratna is a reward for the 10m and 50m pistol shooter's incredible consistency over the last few years. Gold medals at the 2014 Commonwealth and Asian Games were matched by a silver at the world championships, and medals of all three colours at the shooting World Cups. Yet, Rai cant help but be reminded of the one that got away. “It is a huge honour to have won Khel Ratna, but at the same time I know that if I had won an Olympic medal it would have been an even better feeling,” he says. While Rai is one of four to be awarded the Khel Ratna this year, it seems obvious that there is a heirarchy among the winners. While Rai was deciding on a change of clothes, Olympic silver medalist PV Sindhu, bronze medalist Sakshi Malik and Dipa Karmakar, who achieved a historic fourth-place finish in gymnastics, were flying down from Hyderabad where they had just received keys to BMW cars from Sachin Tendulkar. Journalists dropping by Rai's room try to commiserate. “It was your first Olympics, maybe you were nervous,” went one proferred excuse. But Rai knows that wasn't the case. “There was no point in the last four years where I felt nervous. Ever since I won the quota for the country, I was confident about how I was training. I never lost a moment's sleep because I was satisfied with my preparations,” said Rai. WATCH VIDEO What added to the 29-year-old's sense of security was the fact that only a short while before the Olympics, he had participated at the Olympic Test event in Rio. Because the 50m event is held partly outdoors, weather conditions play a crucial role. That too was ideal. “Everything was perfect. I shot well. The weather in the test event was so wonderful. There was good visibility and no wind. I felt nothing could go wrong,” he says. Perhaps the first inkling that things would not go his way came when Rai noticed the gloomy conditions on the day of the 50m event at the Olympics. “At that moment the wind was strong and it was raining as well. I realised this was going to be tough. But I was still sure I would be able to manage it. The wind doesn't blow constantly throughout. You wait for a moment when the wind stops blowing to shoot. But in Rio, it just kept on blowing,” he recalls. Indeed after starting the last round of qualification in fourth place, he messed up his first three shots to slip to 6th. With only the top-8 qualifying for the final, he came back to 4th but again hit an 8 in the 6th shot. Another bad attempt of 7 on the penultimate shot caused him to finish 12th and miss the final. Rai says he doesn't want to think about that day but admits he has moments of hindsight. “Perhaps I could have trained under windy conditions a lot more. I trained in those conditions for a bit during the start of 2015. We would use turning fans to simulate windy conditions at the Army Marksmanship Unit in Mhow. But because we had a lot of international competition that year I didn't train that way for as long as I could have,” he says. Rai avers he isn't looking for an alibi. “I don't want to make excuses for how I performed in the Olympics. But I still sometimes think what could have been. Perhaps I could have entered the competition with a different sort of mentality. Or perhaps I could have managed the wind conditions better,” he says. Indeed, the armyman has shouldered the consequences of his performance squarely. “I had all the facilities all the help and all the support but on the day I was not able to perform. I can't really blame anyone can I?” he says. Rai though believes there is still positives. “Maybe I can take some inspiration from this. Perhaps I could see this as preparations for the 2020 Games. I have learned a lot. I still have a long way to go,” he says.
