It didn’t take Bhaker long to realise that in order to move a step forward, she had to take a few steps back. That required deleting every sour memory of the past and picking up the phone to reconnect with coach Rana for help. “There is something about the way we work together, it’s like magic. He brings out the best in me,” she said after her first medal in Paris, the individual bronze in the 10m Air Pistol event. Both Rana and Bhaker have had a temperamental and stubborn streak, not to mention the “prodigy” tag attached to their names early on. What stood out for Rana, who had gone into a sabbatical post-Tokyo, was the ability to help Bhaker find a work-life balance. “Nothing good comes out of overloading a child,” he says. “Yes, we are everything today because of shooting, but there’s a lot more to life.” The biggest focus area of Project Paris was to let Bhaker detach herself from shooting once she’d left the range for the day.
Bhaker 2.0 took herself to…