For India too it’s an important event. Anjali Bhagwat will take aim to reverse the dashed hopes of her first two Olympics. (In Sydney 2000, she placed 8th in the event.) India has brought nine shooters to Beijing, including two women. And along with Bhagwat, Avneet Kaur Sidhu will also compete in two categories: 10m air rifle and 50m rifle 3 positions.

Shooting at the Olympics has extreme peculiarities. It is, amazingly, a sport to which separation of the men’s and women’s competition began in 1984, a movement completed as recently as 1996, according to The Complete Book of the Olympics by David Wallechinsky, a handbook updated every four years and which every second reporter appears to be carrying in this vast Media Press Centre.

Shooting also has a complicated way of keeping its records. According, once again, to the well-informed Mr Wallechinsky, “Every few years, someone conquers a target and achieves a perfect score. At this point, the officials of the International Shooting Union alter the target by decreasing the size of the bull’s eye and the rings. It is for this reason that the world records for various events sometimes go down instead of up.”

But we are still not done with shooting’s complexities at the Olympics. As the Indian shooters will know only too well, Olympic records and world records are not to be uttered in the same breath. Olympic records, points out Sunny Thomas, manager for the Indian shooting squad, are inevitably less than world records. The tension, he says in the course of a long morning’s practice session, is just so high at the Olympics.

So it could be that while Bhagwat has been ranked first in the world once in the 10m air rifle, she has not yet been able to convert that experience into an Olympic medal. This time may be different, she says. “This is my third Olympics.”

Along with archery, shooting is a game of extreme concentration and calls for the capacity for focused stillness. It’s the kind of concentration, says Bhagwat, that cannot be maintained in “day-to-day” life. Yoga helps. So does physical fitness, though that, she argues, is not a main requirement for a competition that can draw in serious bids by fiftysomethings. In the end, “personality talks”. Then there are the accessories. For instance, the jacket to make for easier movement. There are rules for stiffness and thickness, within which shooters like her must customise to provide for adequate support and balance.

But most of all what counts on the day is the ability to control one’s nerves. Even a pulse, Bhagwat points out, could ruin things. For a fraction of a second, she says, one has to be absolutely still.

Sidhu, at 26 twelve years younger than Bhagwat, says her pulse rate is getting faster as the competition approaches. “We can’t avoid thinking we are shooting in the Olympic Games. I keep reminding myself, be calm, it’s just another sequence of 40 shots.”

It’s a mental sport, she agrees. Just with the first shot, it’s possible to know if she’s in the zone or not. And even when that’s known, the mental battle continues. Sometimes when she starts out shooting so well, she must tell herself to not get carried away headily, to come back to the ground and be focused.

Curiously, shooting, submits Thomas, has an effect on the nerves of the rest of the Indian contingent, coming as it does in the earliest days of the Games. It has, with Rajyavardhan Rathore’s medal in the double trap at Athens, broken the silver barrier for individual achievement at the Olympics. That, he argues, has not increased the pressure on shooters, it has actually lessened it forever, having established it’s doable. He recalls that at Athens, athletes like Anju Bobby George and Beenamol told him, get something in shooting, so tension will be reduced overall. After Rathore did what he did, Thomas told them, “now the rest is up to you.” But the point, he finishes, is not to obliterate tension: “Without tension you cannot shoot.”

Shooting range hall

•Located in Shijingshan district and spread over an area of 45, 645 sq m, the Beijing Shooting Range Hall will host all 11 shooting events at the 2008 Olympics.

• The venue has qualification competition halls, and a final competition hall.

• The construction of the venue began on July 13, 2004 and was completed on July 28, 2007. It has already played host to 2008 ISSF World Cup in April.

• The total seating capacity is 8,600, with 2,170 permanent and 6,430 removable seats.

• The design of Beijing Shooting Range Hall resembles the shape of a hunting bow. It takes into consideration the origins of the sport — hunting in the forest.