A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold

Abhinav Bindra’s journey to become the first Indian to win an individual Olympic gold and the first Indian to win a World Championship gold in shooting, is an example of a single-minded quest for perfection. Shattered by his failure at the 2004 Athens Olympics when a gold medal seemed imminent, he changed as a shooter: he became an athlete bent on redemption, a scientist who would try anything to win at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. His victory was not just a personal one, it broke a sporting barrier that had haunted a nation for a century. This revised edition brings the story up to date, including what happened at the Rio Olympics in 2016, where he narrowly missed being among the medals. Bindra also reveals, for the first time, how he started to suffer from epileptic seizures while in the middle of preparing for Rio and how he overcame this hurdle. Closely involved in telling this remarkable story is sportswriter Rohit Brijnath, who gets into Bindra's mind to help produce one of the finest autobiographies written yet of an Indian sportsman.