‘He is Like a Father To Me’: Manu Bhaker Expounds on Her Bond With Coach Jaspal Rana –

She calls him a father figure, and he perceives himself as her protector. Sometimes, he even needs to protect her from herself.

Manu Bhaker and Jaspal Rana are chalk and cheese when it comes to their individual personalities but together at the shooting range, they can plot Olympic medals with mere eye contact.

The strict disciplinarian coach and his effervescent protege were at PTI headquarters to interact with its editors and talk about a journey which had its fair share of rough and tumble but eventually yielded India two bronze medals at the recent Paris Olympics, making Bhaker the first athlete in post-independence India to achieve such a feat.

“I would say he’s like a father to me and it’s a matter of trust that you put in a person,” said the 22-year-old Bhaker flashing a radiant smile and content look.

“He gives me a lot of courage whenever I feel, whether I can do it or not,” she went on even as Rana kept his head down.

“He will probably slap me and he’ll be like ‘you can do it, you trained for it’.”

It was at this point that Rana joined the conversation, a tad surprised by what Bhaker had just uttered.

“You have a controversy right here,” he interjected.

Bhaker was quick to clarify though, “I mean it’s not like a slap (literally) but like, I’m just using a slang. It’s like he’ll push my limits. He’ll be like ‘you’ve been training for this and obviously you will be able to deliver.”

The two shared a laugh soon after, aware that their stormy parting of ways before the Tokyo Olympics is still one of the most talked about controversies of Indian shooting.

Tokyo was a disaster in every sense of the word for Bhaker, her weapon malfunctioned before the 10m air pistol qualifications and she never really got going after that setback in any of her events.

Rana could only watch in frustration on TV in far away India.

They got back together little over a year back, determined to erase that painful episode and available evidence suggests that the mission has been accomplished.

“When we started 14 months back, there was only one request from my side to her: that we will not discuss the past. We’ll start from here and we’ll move forward. So we kept that thing throughout,” Rana said, keeping the details of their patch-up close to his chest.

“My work is to protect her. It is not only coaching. At this level, we cannot teach them how to see or how to pull the trigger. We just need to give that protection even from their own self,” he explained.

“Sometimes it (performances, attention) goes to your head and you’re all over the place. So, to keep them grounded and keep them protected, that’s our job, the coach’s job,” he asserted as Bhaker nodded in agreement.

The importance of education was one thing on which Rana and Bhaker were on the same page wholeheartedly.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – PTI)