Paris Olympics 2024: Indian women's shooter Manu Bhaker has created history in the Olympic Games. 22-year-old Manu has given India its first medal in the Paris Olympic Games 2024. Women's shooter Manu Bhaker performed brilliantly in the women's 10m air pistol final on the second day, Sunday 28 July, and won the bronze medal. South Korea's Ye Jin Oh won the gold medal with an Olympic record score of 243.2 points in the final. South Korea's Yeji Kim won the silver medal with 241.3 points.
Manu missed out on winning the silver medal by 0.1 points. But she has become India's first female shooter to win a medal in Olympic history. Manu won the bronze medal with a score of 221.7. Girls have started winning medals for India for the third consecutive Olympics.
India's 12-year drought in shooting at the Olympic Games also ended. This is India's first Olympic medal in shooting after the London Olympics 2012. Indian shooters returned empty-handed from the Rio Olympics 2016 and Tokyo Olympics.
Bhaker became the first Indian to reach the final of the women's 10m air pistol event. Manu scored 580 out of 600 and qualified for the final by finishing third among 45 shooters. Manu finished fifth in the women's 25m pistol event at the Asian Shooting Championships 2023 in Changwon and secured a Paris 2024 Olympic quota for India.
Manu decided to pursue a career in shooting at the age of 14 and at that time Rio Olympics 2016 had just ended. Within a week of this, she asked her father to bring her a shooting pistol. Her ever-supporting father Ram Kishan Bhaker bought her a gun and this was the decision that one day made Manu Bhaker an Olympian. In the 2017 National Shooting Championship, Manu Bhaker surprised Olympian and former world number-1 Heena Sidhu and created a new record with a score of 242.3. With this, she defeated Heena in the final of 10 meter air pistol. She won the silver medal in the 2017 Asian Junior Championship and the next year Manu Bhaker proved that she is a special player.
At just 16, she became the youngest Indian to win a gold medal at the ISSF World Cup. Apart from this, she won the gold medal in the mixed doubles event with her partner Om Prakash Mitharwal. After this, Manu won the gold medal in the women's 10m air pistol at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia, setting a new record.
Manu Bhaker's Tokyo Olympic campaign ended with 25m pistol, in which she missed out on a place in the final. After Tokyo 2020, Manu Bhaker became the junior world champion in women's 10m air pistol in Lima and since then she has been winning medals continuously in the junior circuit.
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