‘Toofan bhi agar aa jaye’: How Neeru Dhanda battled illness, rain and cold for Asian Games gold in trap shooting

Neeru Dhanda scripted history by becoming the first Indian shooter to win an Asian Games gold medal in the women’s trap individual event. | Photo Credit: PTI

On the second-last shot of the women’s trap final, Neeru Dhanda prepared to shoot. She settled into a crouched stance and lifted her Beretta DT11 from her side. This was the shot that could put the Asian Games gold beyond doubt. The 26-year-old had already done almost everything right. The Chinese shooter was two points behind her. One more clean hit and Neeru would have the title within her grasp.

Then she withdrew the gun. She wasn’t ready.

Unlike rifle and pistol shooting, the elements are an active part of shotgun shooting. At the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, they had made the conditions particularly difficult. It had been raining for three days in the mountains around the region, making it feel much colder than the recorded 18 degrees. Some spectators huddled beneath umbrellas; others wore raincoats. Neeru had no such protection. Rain trickled from the bridge of her cap and down her eyeline. She was soaked and shivering, her teeth chattering as she waited to take the shot.

Neeru stood at around 5ft 2in in her shooting shoes, just under 50kg. Her Beretta DT11, slick with rain, is about a tenth of her body weight. These were hardly ideal conditions for lining up her body and gun with a clay target four-and-a-quarter inches wide, flying away from her at more than 100 kilometres an hour.

Through it all, Neeru kept her focus. “ Toofan bhi agar aa jaye, aankhen target pe [even if there is a storm, keep your eyes on the target],” she kept telling herself. She brushed the rain from her face, wiped her gun and raised it again.

This time, she was ready.

The orange target flew. Neeru, her gun pressed against her cheek, tracked its path for a fraction of a second and squeezed the trigger. Almost instantly, the orange disc exploded in a puff of pink dust.

She finished with 28 hits from 30, winning the women’s trap title with an Asian Games record. It was India’s first individual gold of this edition and made her the first Indian woman to win an individual medal in women’s trap at the Asian Games.

Neeru Dhanda shares a moment with coach Peter Wilson after her historic Asian Games gold in women’s trap. | Photo Credit: PTI

The gold came after a preparation period that had threatened to derail her campaign altogether. Ten days earlier, Neeru had been lying in a hospital bed in Bhopal, suspected of having H1N1. She spent three days in hospital and, according to her coach Peter Wilson, there had been a point when it was touch and go whether she would make it to the competition.

“I didn’t train for a single day when I was in the camp. For three and a half weeks I was unable to do anything. For five days I was on liquids. I couldn’t even eat,” she said.

The build-up to the biggest competition of her career had been, in Wilson’s words, “Tough. That’s the polite way to put it.”

Neeru’s immediate path to the Asian Games had been challenging enough. Her journey into the sport had been even more unconventional. Shotgun shooting has traditionally been associated with privilege. The last Indian to win Asian Games gold in the trap event before Neeru was Randhir Singh in 1978, the erstwhile titular ruler of Patiala.

Neeru, by contrast, grew up in a farming family. Her father is a farmer and her mother a homemaker, and the family has roots in Jind, Haryana. She still helps in the fields during the wheat-sowing season when she can.

She was introduced to shooting by her cousin Lakshay Sheoran, who won silver in men’s trap at the 2018 Asian Games. Inspired by him, she took up the sport. About six months after deciding to start, in 2019, she moved from her village to the Madhya Pradesh Shooting Academy in Bhopal after hearing that shooters there were provided with guns and cartridges.

She wasn’t given a gun immediately. Her uncle — Lakshay’s father — first wanted to see whether the tiny teenager could handle the weight of a weapon. They went to Bhopal Talaiyya, a lake where cows and buffaloes would bathe. A tin sheet was put up. There he handed her a rusty, Indian-made double-barrelled gun and had her shoot.

She handled it well.

She eventually made her way into the MP State Shooting Academy, where she was given her own gun. Training under former Olympian Mansher Singh, her progress was steady until earlier this year, when it became spectacular. She won gold in the women’s trap at the Shooting World Cup in Lonato, Italy, a result that immediately put her among the favourites for the Asian Games.

Then came the illness.

As she lay in her hospital bed, Neeru wondered whether she would be capable of competing in Nagoya with so little training. Mansher called to reassure her. “Every day I’d speak to him and he’d say it’s only three weeks. It’s nothing. You’ve done enough training for the whole year,” she recalls.

The preparation overseen by Wilson in the preceding months had not been about shooting only when the sun was out. “We train for this [the elements] all year. We never know what conditions you could face,” Neeru says.

When conditions were pleasant, Wilson would find other ways to make them difficult. “We’ll play loud music. Coach will try to distract me. I’ll start setting up to shoot and he’ll pull my coat or he’ll throw a chair in front of me or he’ll yell. Sometimes he’ll pull my hair,” she recalls.

In Nagoya, the coach who had spent months trying to condition Neeru to chaos, was nervous himself. “We’ve had an emotional rollercoaster. She had to roll through the lowest of lows. She was in hospital for three days ten days ago. It’s not easy to get off that and then show up at a big tournament,” Wilson says.

Neeru herself was raring to go. She was on top of the leaderboard after the first two days of qualification. Ahead of the third day, when thoughts of failure might have begun to creep in, she was unflustered.

“ Ekdum chill thi [I was completely relaxed],” she says of her mindset before the final. The night before, she ate a comfort meal of daal and roti. “ Koi Bangladeshi ne bheja tha [a Bangladeshi had sent it to me],” she says.

The next morning, Wilson’s message was simple: “Just grind them to the dust.”

That’s exactly how the final played out. Through the rain, cold and wind, Neeru moved from station to station, hitting targets and maintaining her lead. One by one, her opponents fell away.

Then came the second-last target.

She was shooting from the fourth station, the second-last one to the right of the firing line. Unlike the central position, from where the clay target appears to fly straight ahead, shooters at the stations on the ends of the firing line have to calculate its movement across three axes.

By then, the rain, the cold, the illness, the missed training and the pressure had all become part of the moment.

“I’m not sure if I myself could do it,” Wilson would say later. For Neeru, though, none of it changed what she had to do.

“ Toofan mein bhi chalana ho toh kar deti [If I had to shoot in a storm, I’d do it],” she would later say, making light of the conditions.

The target flew. She fired.

Bang.

Pink dust. Asian Games gold.

Published on Sep 29, 2026

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