Bhopal's Swapnil Kusale won the bronze medal for India in the Olympics. He won a medal in the three-position 50-metre rifle event on Thursday afternoon. He was firing furiously from the beginning. He was confident.
Swapnil Kusale reached the final from seventh place yesterday. Since then, the whole country has been looking at him. The 26-year-old shooter fulfilled that dream. He didn't look like he was in his first Olympics.
Swapnil's idol is MS Dhoni. He is a ticket collector for the Central Railway. Yesterday, he said that in the final event, he would have to play with a cool head like Dhoni. Swapnil was looking for gold, but when he lost it, he was desperate for a medal. This shooter succeeded in that goal.
Earlier, Swapnil's biggest achievement was winning gold in the World University Shooting Event in 2021. It was the first time he came into the light. Then he did what it meant to train hard. He was guided by another medal-winning shooter, Gagan Narang. He won a bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics. This time, Manu broke that precedent.
Swapnil hails from an obscure village in Bhopal. He scored a total of 451.4. Those who won gold and silver in this event were UK Liu of China (463.6 points) and S. Kulish of Ukraine (463.6 points), respectively, scoring 461.3 points.
On the sixth day of the Games, all three medals for India came from shooting. Earlier, Manu Bhaker had won two bronze medals. He also has a division final today. If Manu wins, he will win a hat-trick of medals. From that point of view, there was no expectation from Swapnil. He has been behind the scenes. Rather, there was hope for his teammate, Aishwarya Singh Tomar. He didn't make it to the final. Swapnil showed that everything is possible if the goal is right.
She also won gold in the team event at the World Championships in Cairo in 2022. In the same year, however, he won two gold medals in the individual category at the Shooting World Cup. But there is nothing bigger than an Olympic medal; Swapnil has become a star.