🇮🇳 Manu Bhaker

Manu Bhaker was born on 18 February 2002 in Goria, a village in the Jhajjar district of Haryana. Her father Ram Kishan Bhaker was a chief engineer in the Indian Merchant Marine; her mother Sumedha worked as a school principal in a state secondary school. The young Manu was, until age fourteen, a polymath of school sport — she had been a state-level boxer, a state-level athletics quarterfinalist, a state-level shooting selectee, and a state-level tang soo do karate champion (silver in the 2015 National Youth Games). She chose shooting in 2016 — by her own account, because 'it was the only sport where you compete alone and you only blame yourself.' She joined the Universal Public School Junior Pistol team, was coached by Yashpal Rana and Jaspal Rana (no relation), and within six months was the Indian junior champion.

Her senior international debut at sixteen at the 2018 ISSF World Cup in Guadalajara, Mexico, was the most disruptive entrance the international shooting circuit had seen in a generation: she won the gold medal in her first senior event, breaking the world record for the 10m air pistol qualification round with a score of 388. The 16-year-old who had never previously competed at international level had just defeated the world No. 2 Yulia Karimova and the world champion Olena Kostevych in consecutive rounds. The international press, slightly bewildered, called the result 'inexplicable.' Bhaker, asked at the post-medal press conference how she had managed it, said in Hindi: 'I shoot from my breath. It is not magic.'

She won the 2018 Youth Olympics gold in Buenos Aires, the 2019 ISSF Munich World Cup gold, the 2019 Beijing World Cup gold, and qualified for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics at seventeen. Tokyo, however, became a catastrophe: in the qualification round of the 10m air pistol, her pistol's cocking lever malfunctioned in the eighth shot, costing her around fifteen minutes to repair and resulting in elimination by a single point. The video of her at the firing line, working on the pistol with technical officials, with a look on her face that the Indian press could not write captions for, became the most-shared sporting image in India for two days. She returned to Delhi, took six weeks off, and resumed training with the simple, public stated goal of: 'Paris 2024.'

She missed the cut on the Indian shooting team in 2022 by twenty-three points and did not qualify for the Birmingham Commonwealth Games. The Hindustan Times sports desk, which had been worshipful, ran a profile in October 2022 with the headline 'Has Manu Bhaker Peaked Too Early?' She kept training. She returned to the world cup circuit in 2023, won the Asian Games team gold in Hangzhou, and qualified for Paris 2024 in March 2024 with a mid-tournament 580 score that no Indian shooter had previously achieved.

The Paris 2024 medals — two of them, in five days — are the result. The first, in the women's 10m air pistol individual, was a bronze with a final score of 221.7. The second, in the 10m air pistol mixed team event with Sarabjot Singh, was also a bronze, with the team beating South Korea 16-10 in the third-place match. She narrowly missed a third medal in the 25m sports pistol final, where she came fourth. The double bronze made her the only Indian since Norman Pritchard at the 1900 Paris Games to win multiple individual medals at a single Olympics, and the only Indian woman in Olympic history to do so. She returned to Delhi, where a 25-foot cutout of her had been erected at the IGI airport.

She is, in May 2026, 24 years old. She has signed endorsement contracts with Tata, Reliance, Mahindra and Adidas — the four largest sporting endorsement deals ever signed by an Indian female athlete in a single calendar year. She is the country's most-followed female shooter on social media. She trains at the Karni Singh Shooting Range in New Delhi. She has stated, publicly and consistently, that her next Olympic target is Los Angeles 2028 — at which point she will be 26 and, by every age-curve metric in pistol shooting, in her physical peak. The Indian shooting federation has, in essence, scheduled the next four years around her readiness.