All Vidarsa K Vinod wanted to do was hold a rifle. When an NCC trial was held at her college in 2018, the Kozhikode native turned up just so she’d have something to tell her friends, the novelty of picking a rifle up. She ended up getting a shot instead, one that changed her life and has led to a place in the Indian shooting contingent heading to Aichi-Nagoya for the 2026 Asian Games. Vinod will compete in the women’s 10m air rifle and the women’s 50m three-position events.

Without any formal training, Vidarsa shot well enough that day to be picked for the NCC team. She soon moved to the Kerala state team, but kept struggling. Shooting remains a prohibitively expensive sport for beginners, rifles run into the lakhs before jackets and ammunition even enter the picture, and when Covid hit, she considered leaving the sport rather than take a loan to buy her own equipment.

It didn’t help that friends kept questioning her choice. “There were a lot of questions asked, some positive and some negative. There was also the issue of attendance in college, which was causing problems,” Vidarsa said.

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For a year, she practised yoga and exercised at home, but stayed off the range entirely. Once the pandemic’s threat eased, she felt ready to give the sport another chance. By then she had risen to the top of Kerala’s rankings without ever owning a personal rifle, relying instead on NCC or borrowed weapons, and that gap made the idea of walking away feel harder to justify, not easier.

Indian shooter Vidarsa K Vinod with her coach Manoj Kumar.

It was at a shooting range that she met her husband, who asked her, plainly, how she could call herself a professional shooter without owning her own rifle.

“I was speechless. I was improving my average and I became the Kerala No. 1 without any rifle or jacket at that time. I was delaying taking that plunge. So, that question actually made me think a lot. Then I discussed it with my parents and decided to get a new rifle. I took a loan for that,” Vidarsa said.

Slow grind

Competition for a place in India’s national shooting setup is intense, and getting more so. The number of shooters coming through state programmes has grown sharply in recent years, and a sport long dominated by the northern states has started finding its footing in the south too. Kerala was never known for producing shooters, but Vidarsa goes into these Asian Games as one of its newer faces, carrying real responsibility for a squad that looks very different from the one that went to Hangzhou. She is part of a newer generation trying to displace an established one, and a strong showing here matters.

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India won 22 medals at Hangzhou, a haul that surprised at the time and helped push the country toward its target of 100 medals. Matching or beating that this time will need top-level performances from exactly the newer faces Vidarsa represents.

To make the team, Vidarsa knew she needed specialised coaching. That’s where Manoj Kumar, a SAI high-performance coach, came in, working with her over short stints to rebuild her technique.

“Vidarsa was quick to learn and was accepting of the changes I wanted to make. For every athlete, the level of trust with their coach is different. But Vidarsa bought into the technical changes I wanted to make,” Kumar said. The two have worked together for several years now, and the partnership has only deepened.

When Vidarsa struggled with the weight of her rifle, Kumar suggested she try a lighter model he’d bought for his own daughter. She felt the difference immediately.

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“My daughter has a similar build to Vidarsa, and both struggle to work with heavier rifles. So I imported a lightweight rifle for my daughter. But she was more interested in studying, so I gave the rifle to Vidarsa to test out. Initially she refused to take it, since the weapon was for my daughter. She was convinced when I asked her to just try it, and import one for herself later if she liked it. After a few days, I told her to keep it,” Kumar said.

It’s the rifle Vidarsa carries into Aichi-Nagoya, the one that was never meant to be hers.