Asian Games 2026: A 13-hour sleep reset that kickstarted Suruchi Singh’s comeback to claim gold

India’s Suruchi Singh poses with her Asian Games gold medal in the 10m air pistol mixed team event. | Photo Credit: PTI

A comeback that began with a 13-hour sleep reset

Two days before she helped India win its first shooting gold medal at the Asian Games, Suruchi Singh sat alone in her hotel room in Nagoya, trying to figure out how she was going to pull herself back from the lowest point of her international career.

She couldn’t think of anything, so she did what made sense to her.

She slept. For 13 hours.

When she woke up, she knew what she had to do.

The 20-year-old parted her hair neatly down the middle, kept her nails unvarnished, and wore modest earrings. Churma or malpua made for a special treat. She liked ghar ka khana, with ghar being the village of Sasroli in Haryana’s Jhajjar district.

There were no stickers on her pistol bag of countries she had travelled to, something many of her compatriots flaunted as a flex.

Suruchi wasn’t the sort of person who liked to stand out in a crowd.

The one thing she cared about, though, was pistol shooting.

And she was very good at it. Put her in the middle of a shooting range and she would show just how prodigious her talent is.

On Friday, at the Aichi Prefectural Shooting Range, that’s exactly what she did. Competing in the 10m air pistol mixed team event at the Asian Games, she and Kamaljeet Singh topped qualification with 587, equalling the Asian record.

Then, in the final, they led from start to finish, setting a new Asian record of 484.6 and beating South Korea by 6.6 points to win India’s second gold medal of the Asian Games in Nagoya.

This was India’s first shooting gold medal at these Games, and Suruchi’s role in it was instrumental. She shot 296 in qualification, more than anyone else in the field. In the final, only three of her 24 shots were outside the 10-ring. There was just one series in which she was outshot.

It was simply impressive.

But over the last couple of years, that was exactly what you had come to expect from Suruchi.

The daughter of a former wrestler, she had become one of the world’s leading 10m air pistol shooters, winning five ISSF World Cup gold medals as well as the World Cup Final. She had gone into Nagoya as India’s top-ranked shooter in the event, ahead of Esha Singh, the silver medallist at the previous Asian Games, and Olympic bronze medallist Manu Bhaker.

She was expected to lead India’s challenge for team gold and compete for the individual title herself.

However, she failed to qualify for the individual final, finishing well outside the top eight.

Suruchi Inder Singh, left, and Kamaljeet who won the Gold Medal in the 10M Air Pistol mixed team event at the Asian Games on Friday. | Photo Credit: RV MOORTHY

She had shot just 568.

“I don’t even know the last time I shot that badly. It was unacceptable,” she would say later.

National coach Samresh Jang tried to console her. “It happens. It’s your first time at the Asian Games,” he told her.

But it didn’t help.

Suruchi wasn’t the only Indian pistol shooter to struggle in Nagoya. None of India’s six men’s and women’s 10m air pistol entries made the individual final.

But perhaps no one was expected to do as well as her, which made the failure that much harder.

Coaches recalled that she tried to make a joke about how badly she’d done. No one bought it, although, of course, they wouldn’t tell her.

“She was absolutely distraught,” said national coach Ronak Pandit.

Samresh, who had worked with her for the past couple of years, since she made her senior international debut, knew what had gone wrong.

Suruchi had started smoothly but then shot two consecutive 8s.

“They had both gone to completely different ends of the target. That broke her. After that, instead of shooting freely, she started shooting defensively,” he said.

It was the worst thing that could have happened.

“When you are shooting freely, you are shooting without thinking. When you are defensive, you are only thinking of what can go wrong. You are cross-checking every small element,” he said.

Suruchi knew this as well.

She was normally a very fast shooter.

Now she overthought every shot.

She routinely finished her qualification round in around 40 minutes. On Wednesday, she raised and lowered her gun repeatedly, unwilling to pull the trigger. She eventually struggled through to the finish, taking an hour and 13 minutes to fire her 60 shots — just two minutes less than the maximum permitted time.

But there was no point talking about technique at that moment.

Maybe with a more experienced shooter, yes. But, certainly not with someone making her debut.

“Sometimes all you can do is give them space. Let them get over it on their own,” Samresh said.

For Suruchi, the hard reset came in the form of a long sleep.

She got up bleary-eyed but clear-headed, knowing exactly what she had to do.

As India’s best shooter in the selection trials, she had one more chance in the mixed team event.

Her partner was Kamaljeet Singh, another debutant. He had failed to make the final of the men’s event by a solitary point.

Unlike Suruchi, he couldn’t sleep at all.

Suruchi, though, was raring to go. She had a point to prove.

She slept for a more reasonable eight hours the night before the mixed team event.

“I got up aaram se, I prepared myself. I left on time, not even a minute late,” she said.

It wasn’t as if a switch had been flicked and suddenly everything became easy.

Although her score didn’t suggest it, she still had to grit her way through qualification.

“There were times when I made a bad shot and right after that I didn’t have the confidence to release the trigger for my next shot. That happened a few times,” she said.

But she made her way through that round.

In the final, her confidence surged with every shot she made.

After the first series of 10 shots, India led South Korea 103 to 98.1, with 52.7 of India’s points coming from Suruchi’s gun. There was still some way to go, but the contest had already begun to tilt decisively in India’s favour.

“When I saw that score, I felt relaxed. I was very happy. Wow, acchi khaasi lead hai (it’s a very good lead). No tension! Now I can shoot relaxed,” she said.

She shot exactly as she had hoped, even compensating for Kamaljeet, who had a more up-and-down final.

“I knew that when Suruchi was shooting so well, I could even shoot a couple of bad shots and we would be fine. When you have a teammate like that you feel more confident,” he said.

Towards the end of the competition, the long faces from just a couple of days earlier were long forgotten.

Coach Samresh Jang even called for a timeout before the final couple of shots, for no other reason than that he had one and wanted to tell his team they were going to win gold.

With the gold secured, Suruchi still had a long day ahead of her: media commitments, dope-control tests and then the journey back to her hotel room.

After everything that had happened over the previous two days, there was only one thing she wanted.

“I’m looking forward to sleeping,” she said.

Published on Sep 25, 2026

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