Gagan's mind was only focussed on CWG medal

Distraught after being ignored for the khel ratna award, double gold medal-winner gagan narang decided to let his rifle do the talking instead of taking the protest route

Distraught after being ignored for the Khel Ratna award, double gold medal-winner Gagan Narang decided to let his rifle do the talking instead of taking the protest route
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India's Gagan Narang with his rifle after his gold medal-winning feat at the CWG in New Delhi yesterday. PIC/RAJEEV TYAGI

India would have been two gold medals short had Gagan Narang not participated in the Commonwealth Games in protest of being ignored for the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, the country's highest sporting honour.

Narang was distraught that he was not awarded the honour after his bronze medal-winning effort at the Munich World Championships where he became India's first shooter to qualify for the 2010 London Olympics. The shooter used that disappointment as a motivator to shoot to glory here. Yesterday, Narang became the first athlete at CWG 2010 to win a second gold medal and even equalled his own world record in the 10m Air Rifle event, scoring 600 points in the qualifying.

He scored a further 103.6 points in the final to pip India's first and only Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra (103.0 points) to the post. Less than 24 hours earlier, Narang and Bindra had clinched gold in the 10m Air Rifle Pairs event.

Baljit reveals...
National Rifle Association of India secretary general Baljit Singh Sethi told MiD DAY yesterday how not very long ago, Narang was not in the right frame of mind after the Khel Ratna snub. "When Gagan shared his disappointment at being left out of the Khel Ratna awards list for the third year in a row, I told him that we would do everything in our capacity to try and see that the government gave him the award. I told him we had two options. The first would be to tell the ministry to take away the award from the one who was nominated for it or we could ask the ministry to add Gagan to the list of awardees," explained Sethi.u00a0 However, the shooter politely turned down Sethi's offer. "Gagan said he would not want to take away another's prize as that would make him feel guilty. Nor did he want to create a controversy by pressurising the ministry to add his name to the list of awardees.

In his stride
Instead, he told me that if the government doesn't feel he deserved the award, he should not get it and would instead let his gun do the talking. That's when I was a 100 per cent sure that Gagan would strike gold at the CWG," added Sethi.u00a0 That he succeeded by beating Olympic champion Bindra was the icing on the cake. In fact, this is the third time in the recent past that Gagan had outscored Bindra. First, he finished third in Munich while Bindra was 25th and then, he contributed 598 points compared to Bindra's 595 in the 1193 they aggregated for the 10m Air Rifle Pairs event on Tuesday. Fittingly, Bindra touted Narang to be India's next Olympic medallist in shooting.