India’s Olympic hopes, after staring at Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore’s double-barrel rifle for most of 2007, were shot between the eyes in March this year. Dealing with a long confidence crisis, he scored an abysmal 129/150 at the Asian Clay Championship in Jaipur. Later, a seventh-place finish at the World Cup meant Rathore didn’t seem the shooter he was in 2004 when he won India’s only medal — a silver — at the Athens Games.

Rathore hasn’t returned home since March. Away from media glare and doomsday predictions, he’s fighting his personal demons in the United States, his pre-Olympics training destination from where he will go directly to Beijing.

In a rare interview a little over a month before the Olympics, he told The Sunday Express that his positive mindset — “rising of the sun”, he called it — was back. “I’ve been deep in the dumps for lack of personal motivation,” he said in a detailed e-mail interview. “If you have noticed, my performance took a dip after I won gold at the Cairo World Cup in 2006. To start with, I immediately pulled myself out of all competitions from January 2007 to July 2007. This phase also coincided with the loss of motivation to be my best, for a variety of reasons.”

During the six-month break in 2007 and subsequent lows in the first half of the Olympic year, Rathore dealt with recurring bouts of self-doubt. “Probably people thought that there was something terribly wrong with my shooting. In fact, I pondered over the technical reasons for low scores, kept changing my styles and adjusting my gun,” he said.

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