The athlete as backward prophet is the fashion. What would you say to your younger self, we ask? Write him a letter, please. And so, graying, deliberate heroes provide sage advice to the reckless, obsessive, dynamic creatures they once were.
He, the Olympic champion, is not the type to look back. But we want to explore the bones of athletic journeys, and younger athletes want to see the paths he's traveled. And this is when he will repeatedly say that, yes, he achieved several goals, but he “failed miserably.”
Failed?
In “reaching my full potential?”
But wait, what was the problem?
“My lack of balance.”
Abhinav Bindra is talking about something beyond just winning. About winning well. About the courage of a form that we do not always recognize. Courage to take days off, to do less, to not get consumed by sports, not to get caught in the unhealthy grip of competition.
“Why did I doubt myself?” he says. “Because all my eggs were in one basket. Because my self-worth depended on where my name ranked. I didn't have the courage to let go.”
“My most successful years, in terms of quality, were in 2001 in the US, when I was a student-athlete. I only had so many hours to train. I was challenged intellectually, I was challenged off the playing field. I went for a walk. Even if I didn't win in Athens (2004 Olympic Games), I was at my best then. And that was because of the balance. If everything rests on one pillar and there is an earthquake, everything shakes.”
Then he became obsessive, his life consisted of a narrow pursuit of gold, and ironically that's what he got. But if he had remained balanced, could he have been even better? A career never answers every question.
It has been 16 years since Bindra won the gold in the 10m air rifle in Beijing and since it is the Olympic year, he is a good subject for another interrogation. After all, he's not the athlete I knew. He has a penchant for occasional Vesper martinis – shaken, of course – but, to put it politely, there's not much else about him that says James Bond. Except the gun. The last weapon he has left after 22 years of shooting is a gold gun handed to him by Walther, 007's gunsmith. The other weapons are gone, there are still some pellets left and a few jackets. His athletic skin has fallen off. Now he is someone who used to be talented.
Singer Jon Bon Jovi recently spoke about buying back his first guitar. Then he played it, because that's what musicians do. But athletes let go. Exhausted and played out, they don't look back. They may be holding on to some memorabilia, as Rahul Dravid has done with a pair of bats and gloves, but as the Indian cricket coach said, they are “in some boxes that I haven't opened for years”.
But hasn't he, batting engineer, stepped back into the nets at some point, only you remember the sound and sensation of the timing? Like strumming an old guitar?
“Never hit a ball into the net after I've stopped,” he replied.
Athletes often continue to play sports in one form or another because that is all they know. Dravid became a mentor. Bindra works with the International Olympic Committee on mental health and protecting athletes from harassment and abuse, sits on the board of Bajaj Auto and has opened 15 hi-tech centers, some used for elite athletic performance and others used by patients in hospitals for rehabilitation.
But most dear to him is his foundation, through which he runs Olympic Values Education programs (ask and you'll get monthly reports and sermons on sports and gender equality), supports athletes and is currently involved in an environmental forest restoration project in Odisha.
Growing up requires selfishness, no time for anything or anyone other than a dream. But Bindra's new life has a selflessness that appeals to the wiser. He once said he woke up at 3 a.m. and practiced in his underwear. Now he raves about meeting a 14-year-old Adivasi swimmer in Odisha, where he has a sports science centre, who “very enthusiastically discussed his VO2 max values with me”.
The shooter shuffles when asked about his past, as if it is a country he does not want to return to. We dwell on the athlete's glory days more than he would like. We like to rewind, they move forward. We see gold, they remember painful swarms of butterflies.
But he must be missing something, an element of his younger crazy self, something so powerful that he still carries with him. He pauses. “If you're an athlete, you're so incredibly damn witty and I haven't discovered that yet.”
He smiles.
“It could come back.”
Usually not, because life is rarely distilled so intensely again. The roar of ambition fades and focus fades like a painting left in the car. But at least a small part of what he built as an athlete remains with him. His power.
His father is not doing well, a stress that is more intrusive than anything the sport brings. But he is a friend of stress and even now he reacts accordingly. “I'm going into competition mode a bit. To not be overwhelmed by emotions, to look at things clinically and find appropriate solutions.”
He says he only remembers “two-three shots” from a long career, and I smell slight exaggeration. But hey, he's the athlete. Perhaps, he laughs, there are so few, “because there is a lot of trauma associated with competition. Part of my brain doesn't want to go back to it.”
He used to train in Dortmund with coaches Gaby Buhlmann and Heinz Reinkemeier and still meets them, but always in a neutral city. In the eight years since he retired, he has never returned to that German city because the butterflies in his stomach caused chaos there every day.
'It took me eight years to heal. It takes a lot out of you.”
And yet that Olympic shot, the last, the 10.8 he fired to win in 2008, remains a first kiss.
“I close my eyes and I can feel it,” he says.
Rohit Brijnath is an assistant sports editor at The Street TimesSingapore, and co-author of Abhinav Bindra's book A shot into history: my obsessive journey to Olympic gold. He posts @rohitdbrijnath.