Abhinav Bindra Won the 10 m Air Rifle at Beijing 2008 With 700.5, Shooting 104.5 in the Final After Qualifying Fourth, for India's First Individual Olympic Gold

Abhinav Bindra won the men’s 10 m air rifle at the Beijing Olympics on 11 August 2008 with a total of 700.5, made up of 596 in qualifying and 104.5 in the ten-shot final. Olympedia, the database kept by Olympic historians, says it was the first individual gold medal won by an Indian athlete in any sport. The International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) adds that it was India’s first Olympic gold since the men’s hockey team won at Moscow in 1980.

Bindra was 25. He had qualified fourth, two points behind the leader, and he won by 0.8 of a point after a final in which no shot of his scored less than 10.0.

The qualifying round: 596 and fourth place

Olympedia lists 51 shooters from 37 countries in the event, held at the Beijing Shejiguan range. Qualifying was six series of ten shots each, 600 as the maximum, and the top eight went through to a ten-shot final scored to a tenth of a point. The total for the medals was the qualifying score plus the final.

Bindra’s six series were 100, 99, 100, 98, 100 and 99, which add up to 596. Finland’s Henri Häkkinen led with 598 and China’s Zhu Qinan, the Athens 2004 champion, had 597. Romania’s Alin Moldoveanu also shot 596 and ranked third. Olympedia’s table has four more shooters on 595 inside the top eight, and a fifth on 595 in ninth place: India’s Gagan Narang, who missed the final and is covered below.

Ten shots, shot by shot

Olympedia’s shot-by-shot table gives Bindra’s final as 10.7, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.5, 10.5, 10.6, 10.0, 10.2 and 10.8. The ISSF says he opened with the 10.7 and never dropped below 10.0.

Häkkinen’s ten were 10.1, 10.2, 10.5, 10.0, 10.2, 10.3, 10.0, 10.1, 10.3 and 9.7. Adding the first nine shots to each man’s qualifying score gives 689.7 for both, which matches the ISSF’s report that they went into the last shot level. Zhu’s list from Olympedia, ending in a 10.5, puts him at 689.2 before his own last shot.

Häkkinen’s 9.7 left him on 699.4 for bronze. Zhu’s 10.5 lifted him to 699.7 and silver. Bindra’s 10.8 made 700.5. The ISSF’s account calls 10.8 his best shot of the final, and ESPN’s Sharda Ugra writes that 10.9 is the highest score a single shot can earn in the format.

Häkkinen’s 101.4 was the lowest final of the three medallists, and Bindra’s 104.5 the highest. Ugra’s 2016 profile for ESPN calls 104.5 the highest score ever shot in an Olympic final, a claim that dates from before that year’s Games.

A rifle to fix in the sighting minutes

ESPN’s account of the final, by Sharda Ugra, describes a problem before the shooting began. In the five minutes of sighting time, the rifle’s sights were so far off that shots meant for the centre landed around the 4 ring. His coach, Gabriele Bühlmann, thought the gun had been knocked out of its settings by accident. ESPN says Bindra had to turn about 40 clicks on the sights in the minutes that remained, and that he had slept badly the night before.

ESPN says Bindra did not know for certain that he had won after the last shot. Bühlmann gave him a thumbs-up and, in the article’s account, told him, “You are first. Gold.” She had worked with him for eight years, according to the same article.

Eight years of getting there

Olympedia’s biography gives Bindra’s birth date as 28 September 1982, in Dehradun. That made him 17 when he shot his first Olympic qualifying round on 18 September 2000 in Sydney, as the ISSF says. ESPN’s profile puts his age there at 18, so the sources differ by a year, and the birth date supports the ISSF figure.

Olympedia’s Sydney table has him tied for 11th with 590, one point below the 591 of the eighth qualifier. ESPN says he missed the final by a point, and the ISSF puts it at three places. Two years before, the ISSF says, he had been the youngest participant at the 1998 Commonwealth Games.

At Athens on 16 August 2004 he qualified third with 597, behind Zhu’s 599 and Li Jie’s 598, and finished seventh after a final of 694.6. Zhu won with a world record 702.7, Olympedia notes. The ISSF quotes a social media post in which Bindra says he told the journalist Sharda Ugra after Athens, “I am done. I want to give up.” In the same post, he says she replied that he would win gold in Beijing. A back injury kept him out of competition for most of a year, the ISSF says, and he won the 10 m air rifle at the 2006 World Championships in Zagreb, which Olympedia records and IANS calls the first World Championship gold by an Indian shooter.

Narang, the other Indian in the field

Gagan Narang finished ninth in qualifying with 595, Olympedia shows, and so did not shoot the final. At Athens four years earlier he had been tied for 12th with 593.

The Press Information Bureau lists Narang among the five Indian shooters who have won Olympic medals, with Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (Athens 2004), Bindra, Vijay Kumar and Narang (London 2012) before Manu Bhaker. The full list of events and scores is in tuput’s piece on Manu Bhaker’s two bronze medals. At the Delhi Commonwealth Games in 2010, Bindra and Narang won the air rifle pairs gold together, the ISSF records, and Bindra added individual silver.

What came after

On 26 January 2009 the government announced the Padma Bhushan for Bindra, IANS reported. The same report says he had received the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, then the highest sports award, in 2001. tuput could not open the Ministry’s own list of awardees, so both dates rest on the news agency.

He carried the flag for India at the opening ceremony of Rio 2016, Olympedia notes, and finished fourth there, in his fifth Olympics, after a shoot-off against Ukraine’s Serhiy Kulish that the ISSF reports. London 2012 had ended in 16th place. Olympedia’s Commonwealth Games tally for him is five gold, three silver and one bronze, across 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014.

Bindra sat on the ISSF Athletes Committee. The ISSF says he was a member from 2010 to 2020 and its chair from 2014, while PTI reports his chairmanship as 2014 to 2018 and says he received the federation’s top honour, the Blue Cross, at its General Assembly in Munich in 2018. He joined the International Olympic Committee’s Athletes’ Commission in 2018, according to the ISSF and Akashvani News.

The IOC Executive Board decided on 22 July 2024 to give him the Olympic Order, the ISSF reports, and Akashvani said it would be presented at the 142nd IOC Session in Paris on 10 August. The ISSF and Akashvani call him the first Indian to receive it. Olympedia’s list of recipients also names Sivanthi Adithan of India, an administrator, in 1995 in the silver category, and files Bindra’s 2024 award under silver too. The sources do not agree on “first Indian”, and tuput reports both. The ISSF reports that he thanked the IOC in Paris and said he hoped to keep contributing to the Olympic movement.

The ISSF links the Beijing gold to what followed in Indian sport, and says Neeraj Chopra’s javelin gold at Tokyo 2020 “emulated” it. tuput’s profile of Neeraj Chopra has that result. The first individual Olympic medal for an athlete from independent India, Khashaba Jadhav’s wrestling bronze at Helsinki in 1952, has its own piece. Through the Abhinav Bindra Foundation, the ISSF says, athletes in swimming, badminton, boxing and para-athletics have had free access to sports technology and training.

On 11 August 2026, the 18th anniversary of the final, ANI reported Bindra’s post on X: “18 years ago today, I reached the biggest peak of my sporting life.”