Paris: Swapnil Kusale had made a promise to himself soon after a spectacular implosion saw him go from sniffing an individual medal to sliding to fourth at last year’s Asian Games. “That had to be my last.”

Less than a year on, at a stage when promises tend to evaporate under the heat of extreme mental duress, Kusale kept it.

And off he went, rising this time instead of receding, from sixth to fifth to third in a testing final. The 28-year-old ensured he ended there, delivering an impressive men’s 50m rifle 3 positions bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics with a score of 451.4 that rested only below Ukraine’s silver medallist Serhiy Kulish (461.3) and China’s world record holder and champion Liu Yukun (463.6).

The medal is a first for India in the event, and the third overall at these Games — all coming from the shooting ranges of Chateauroux.

The soft-spoken Maharashtra shooter had been, until Thursday, defined by heartbreaks of one harrowing final shot staring at silverware and two fourth-place finishes at the Asian Games in 2023 and the World Championships of 2022.

At the Olympics of 2024, the nearly man turned history man for India.

In an event extremely technical and gruelling, no Indian had ever made the Olympics final. Kusale, battling a severe tonsils issue through the last couple of years that kept flaring up in tournaments, changed that with his medal. In a sport where India fired blanks in the previous two Games, a two-medal 2012 London Olympics had remained its high point. Kusale, with those two shiny rings on his shooting arm, including one of that five concentric circles, changed that with the third medal.

“Heartbeat sabki badhti hai (every shooter’s heartbeat pounds). I just kept focussing on my breathing. Kept calm and shot,” the Kolhapur-born shooter carrying the rich legacy of the sport in the city forward and upward, said. “For me, it was about learning from the mistakes of my past.”

The past had those fourth-places finishes writ large, but underneath it was a slightly more prolonged issue. The feeble final shots — 7.6 at the Asian Games and 8.2 at the Worlds — were part of Kusale’s larger tendency to stumble in the standing series after being steady in kneeling and prone.

With personal coach Deepali Deshpande, whom Kusale referred to as his “second mother” after winning the medal and has trained with for years in Pune, they went about working on it. And on the big day, the slight frailty became a major strength.

Kusale began the final with an iffy 9.6, and by the end of the 15-shot kneeling series, was sixth among the eight finalists. His prone was a series of sublime consistency, shooting all 10s through the 15 shots, including a high 10.8. Such was the field and the quality of shooting though that the he remained fifth with a score of 310.1.

The standing series followed a short breather, post which Kusale stood up.

“To be honest, I didn’t see the scoreboard, and who was ranked where,” Kusale said of his thoughts through the break. “I could hear the scores, but I ignored it.”

The start to the two five-shot standing series wasn’t the brightest (9.5) before a 10.7 brought him back on track. After the first standing series, Kusale was placed fourth, just 0.1 behind the bronze. At the end of the second series in which he shot 9.1 and yo-yoed from second to fourth to third, the Indian stayed in the medal bracket leading into the single shot eliminations.

There, with a 10.5, he broke away from Norway’s fifth-placed Jon-Hermann Hegg, who shot 9.8. Kusale then shot back-to-back 9s. By then, however, he had opened up a wide enough lead to keep Czech Jiri Privratsky at bay. A 10.0 off his 44th shot and Kusale was done, 0.5 points behind silver medallist Kulish and with a bronze locked in.

Kusale had filtered out the sight and sound of scores, but not a steady stream of cheer coming from behind in the stands from the group of Indian supporters. “I was liking that sound,” he said. “And I just wanted to make them happy.”

This was the happiest he would’ve felt. In a career that held promise as a junior and won him the senior nationals in 2015 beating Olympic medallist Gagan Narang, Kusale’s steps of progress had been a touch slow. “Maybe my mindset wasn’t too strong back then,” said Kusale, who wasn’t part of the Tokyo Olympics squad three years ago.

His mindset on the morning of the biggest final of his career brought butterflies to his stomach. He didn’t eat much and had black tea, a forced substitute to this masala chai lover (lactose intolerant, milk products were the root cause of Kusale’s prolonged tonsils problems). “I did say a prayer,” he said.

And kept a promise.

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