Suruchi slept 13 hours, Kamaljeet just four. Then they won gold at Asian Games

Suruchi Phogat returned to her hotel after her individual event and slept for 13 straight hours. Kamaljeet Singh, meanwhile, lay awake, tossing and turning. He went to bed around 1am and woke at 5am, managing four hours of sleep.

The two shooters dealt with disappointment differently, but shared the same feeling after their individual events at the Asian Games: the sinking realisation that a competition they had worked towards for years had slipped away.

On Friday, they found a way to turn that feeling around. Paired at the last minute in the 10m air pistol mixed team event, the Haryana shooters combined for 484.6 points in the final to win gold and set an Asian Games record.

South Korean pair of Choo Gaeun and Hong Suhyeon finished second with 478.0, while Iran took bronze with 415.8. After days of near-misses, it was India’s first shooting gold at the Games and second overall, after the women’s cricket team’s victory.

For Suruchi and Kamaljeet, however, the victory was more personal: a chance to leave behind the individual performances that had threatened to define their Games. “Maybe that was not our day. And maybe today was,” Suruchi said.

For the 20-year-old, it was an unusually difficult outing. She began shooting at 13, travelling with her father — who initially wanted her to wrestle — from their home in Haryana’s Sasroli to an academy in Bhiwani. By 2025, she had won three consecutive World Cup gold medals and set a junior world record, establishing herself as one of India’s leading young shooters.

In Nagoya, her first major tournament exposure, she stumbled at the first block. Suruchi’s qualification began to unravel after a couple of 8s during warm-up. The shots unsettled her, and she became too cautious. She would raise her pistol and hesitate, unable to release the trigger.

A round that normally took around 35 minutes stretched to 73. “In the individual series I was under a lot of tension. I was looking at the scores. In my mind the scores were going round and round, and because of that I wasn’t able to release the trigger.

I was shooting late,” she said. “I cannot remember the last time I shot that bad.” Kamaljeet’s individual campaign followed a different course but ended in frustration. The 23-year-old started strongly and briefly led qualification after the third series of 100 out of 100.

A couple of poor shots, however, threw him off. He finished with 580 points, one short of the 581 required to reach the final. “I had started very well, but two or three shots in between affected me and I wasn’t able to get stable mentally,” he said.

For Kamaljeet, who had rebuilt his career after a serious injury, the setback was particularly difficult. In 2023, an autorickshaw carrying him back to his village after training was involved in an accident that killed two co-passengers and left him with a fractured thigh bone.

He spent a month in hospital as his family borrowed money for treatment, before rebuilding his career in pistol shooting. The prospect of leaving Japan without a medal remained until India changed its combination on the match-eve, replacing Kedarling Uchagave with Kamaljeet because of the form he showed in qualification.

“I got a second chance, and I wanted to make the most of it,” he said. Suruchi took a different approach. She did not spend the intervening hours dissecting her individual performance or making technical adjustments. She rested and focused on the next competition.

“I rested after the match. I just focused on the next match,” she said. “That day when I came home, I slept for 13 hours. I got up feeling fresh.” By Friday, both had managed to put the previous day behind them. Their coach, Samresh Jung, resisted making any radical changes to their technique.

His role was more of a mental coach. “They needed to trust the process again, rather than allow a handful of poor shots to dictate the rest of their performance,” Jung, one of India’s finest pistol shooters, said. “They aren’t sanyasis that they can simply erase the memories from a day ago, but my task was to replace the negative thoughts with positive ones.” If there were nerves, the duo hid them well.

They topped the qualification with a total of 587 and carried that form into the final. In the medal rounds, they took control early and maintained their advantage over South Korea. The 6.6-point winning margin reflected a performance far removed from the uncertainty of their individual events.

For Kamaljeet, the gold brought relief as much as triumph. “It feels good. It’s the Asian Games, and before coming here, I was sure I would return home with a medal. I didn’t know it would be gold, but I was confident of winning one,” the junior world champion said.

For Suruchi, it was reassurance that one difficult competition need not become a defining one. Over the course of a 18-year-long career, Mihir Vasavda has covered 2010 FIFA World Cup; the London 2012, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 Olympic Games; Asian Games in 2014 and 2022; Commonwealth Games in 2010 and 2018; Hockey World Cups in 2018 and 2023 and the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup.

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