Manu Bhaker Won Two Bronze Medals at Paris 2024, the First Two-Medal Games for an Athlete From Independent India, and India's Olympic Shooting Total Reached Seven

Manu Bhaker won two bronze medals at the Paris 2024 Olympics. She scored 221.7 in the women’s 10 m air pistol final on 28 July 2024, then beat South Korea 16-10 in the 10 m air pistol mixed team bronze match with Sarabjot Singh on 30 July. Olympics.com calls her the first athlete from independent India to win two medals at a single Games, and the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s press office, calls her the first Indian athlete to do so.

Three of India’s six medals in Paris came from the shooting range, which Olympics.com says is the most India has won in shooting at one Games, ahead of two at London 2012. With Swapnil Kusale’s bronze, that took India’s Olympic shooting total to seven medals.

Qualifying on 27 July, the final on 28 July

The women’s 10 m air pistol was shot at the National Shooting Centre in Châteauroux. Olympedia, the database kept by Olympic historians, lists 44 shooters from 33 countries. Qualifying on 27 July brought Bhaker a 580, third behind Veronika Major of Hungary and Oh Ye-jin of South Korea, who both shot 582. PIB says she hit 27 perfect scores, the highest number in the round, and that she was the first Indian woman to qualify for this event’s final at any Olympics. PIB adds that she was the first Indian woman in 20 years to reach an individual Olympic shooting final, since Suma Shirur’s 10 m air rifle final at Athens 2004.

Eight shooters reached the final. Olympics.com’s report says Bhaker opened with 50.4 in the first series, good for second place, and slipped to third after two 9.6s in the second. She took second back from South Korea’s Kim Ye-ji at the end of the third series and again late in the final, but Kim edged past her by 0.1 point to enter the gold medal round. Oh Ye-jin won gold with an Olympic record 243.2 and Kim took silver with 241.3. Bhaker finished on 221.7, ahead of Vietnam’s Trinh Thu Vinh in fourth with 198.6, according to Olympedia.

After the final Bhaker said, as Olympics.com quotes her: “I lost silver by .1, I’m still very grateful to win bronze for my country.”

The Ministry’s release of that day says it was India’s first medal of the Games, the first Olympic shooting medal for India since London 2012, and the first by an Indian woman shooter. Tokyo 2020 had ended differently. Olympics.com reports that a pistol malfunction cost her six minutes in the Tokyo qualifying round and she missed the final by two points, and Olympedia lists her 12th. Olympedia adds that the result had led her to consider giving up the sport to focus on her studies.

The mixed team bronze on 30 July

The mixed team event pairs a woman and a man from the same country, each shooting 10 m air pistol. Qualifying took place on 29 July. Olympedia’s table has India’s first pair, Bhaker (291) and Sarabjot Singh (289), on 580, third of 17 pairs. Pairs one and two went to the gold medal match and pairs three and four to a bronze match, so India met South Korea’s Oh Ye-jin and Lee Won-ho, who had qualified fourth on 579.

India won the bronze match 16-10, which PIB’s release of 30 July and Olympics.com both report. In Olympics.com’s account, Bhaker opened with a 10.2 and Singh’s 8.6 cost India the first two points. He then shot 10.5, 10.4 and 10, which gave India the next six points and an 8-2 lead. South Korea cut it to 14-10, and on the last shots Oh Ye-jin scored a 9 and her partner 9.5, Bhaker a 9.4 and Singh a 10.2 to confirm the medal. Of India’s 26 shots, 19 scored at least 10, against 12 for South Korea.

It was India’s first shooting team event medal at a Summer Games and Singh’s first Olympic medal, Olympics.com says. Serbia’s Zorana Arunović and Damir Mikec took the gold, beating Türkiye’s İlayda Tarhan and Yusuf Dikeç, Olympedia reports. PIB says Singh, born in Dheen village in Ambala district of Haryana, has been a Khelo India athlete since 2019. Bhaker was born in Jhajjar in the same state, PIB’s 28 July release says.

How the record is worded

PIB’s 30 July release says Bhaker is the first Indian athlete to win two medals in a single Olympic edition. Olympics.com says she is the first athlete from independent India to do so, and the qualifier has a reason. Olympedia lists two silver medals won by Norman Pritchard at Paris 1900, in the 200 m and the 200 m hurdles, under India. Britain claims him too, Olympedia records: the British historian Ian Buchanan holds that he was British, while the Indian historian Gulu Ezekiel claims him on his birth and his years in India. tuput’s profile of Neeraj Chopra covers the same question for athletics, and tuput does not rule between the two claims.

Two other Indians have won two Olympic medals each, at different Games. Olympics.com names wrestler Sushil Kumar (bronze at Beijing 2008, silver at London 2012) and badminton player PV Sindhu (silver at Rio 2016, bronze at Tokyo 2020).

The 25 m pistol, and the seven shooting medals

Bhaker had a third event. In the 25 m pistol, Olympedia’s table has her qualifying second on 2 August with 590, behind Major’s 592. In the final on 3 August, Yang Ji-in of South Korea won gold and France’s Camille Jedrzejewski silver, both with 37 hits, and Major took bronze over Bhaker in a shoot-off, which left Bhaker fourth.

India finished Paris with six medals, one silver and five bronze, according to Olympics.com. Neeraj Chopra’s javelin silver was the one silver, and the men’s hockey team’s 2-1 win over Spain, covered in tuput’s Paris hockey piece, was another of the bronzes. The shooting medals, as Olympics.com’s list records them:

• Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, men’s double trap, silver, Athens 2004, India’s first Olympic shooting medal.
• Abhinav Bindra, men’s 10 m air rifle, gold, Beijing 2008, India’s first individual Olympic gold and its only one until Neeraj Chopra’s gold at Tokyo 2020.
• Vijay Kumar, men’s 25 m rapid fire pistol, silver, London 2012.
• Gagan Narang, men’s 10 m air rifle, bronze, London 2012, with 701.1.
• Manu Bhaker, women’s 10 m air pistol, bronze, Paris 2024.
• Manu Bhaker and Sarabjot Singh, 10 m air pistol mixed team, bronze, Paris 2024.
• Swapnil Kusale, men’s 50 m rifle three positions, bronze, Paris 2024, with 451.4. China’s Liu Yukun won with 463.6 and Ukraine’s Serhiy Kulish took silver with 461.3.

PIB’s 28 July release makes Bhaker the fifth Indian shooter to win an Olympic medal, after Rathore, Bindra, Vijay Kumar and Narang. Olympics.com adds that Indian shooters won medals at three Games in a row from 2004 to 2012, then at none of the next two.

What the Ministry and the federation say about the support

The Paris cycle figures come from PIB’s two releases. For Bhaker, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports lists Rs 28,78,634 (about Rs 28.8 lakh) under the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) and Rs 1,35,36,155 (about Rs 1.35 crore) under the Annual Calendar for Training and Competition (ACTC). The Ministry also lists assistance for ammunition and weapon servicing, pellet and ammunition testing, barrel selection, and training with her personal coach Jaspal Rana in Luxembourg. For Singh, it lists Rs 20,24,928 under TOPS and Rs 1,26,20,970 under ACTC, plus the expenses of his personal trainer, Abhishek Rana, for attending the Games at Châteauroux. PIB describes both as TOPS athletes who have competed in the Khelo India Games.

The National Rifle Association of India (NRAI) is the sport’s national federation. Its website says it is affiliated to the International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF), the Indian Olympic Association and three other bodies, has 53 affiliated state associations and units, and runs the National Shooting Championship Competitions. Shooters who meet the national squad standards train, it says, in coaching camps whose boarding and lodging the government pays for, and receive free ammunition and targets.

The Khel Ratna and her results since Paris

On 2 January 2025 the Ministry announced the National Sports Awards 2024. The Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna went to four people: chess player D Gukesh, hockey captain Harmanpreet Singh, para-athlete Praveen Kumar and Bhaker. Sarabjot Singh and Swapnil Kusale were among the Arjuna Award winners. PIB describes the Khel Ratna as the award for the most outstanding performance by a sportsperson over the previous four years. India Today reports that President Droupadi Murmu conferred the awards on 17 January 2025.

On 13 October 2025 the Indian Olympic Association held a ceremony in New Delhi for the Paris medallists, attended by Bhaker, and announced cash awards for the medallists and their coaches, Olympics.com reports.

The ISSF’s news service dates her 2026 results. On 30 May 2026 she won silver at the Munich World Cup in the 10 m air pistol mixed team with Samrat Rana, 483.6 points to China’s 483.9, and shot the highest individual score of the match, 242.1. Its report of 27 July says she took bronze in the women’s 25 m pistol at the Hangzhou World Cup, behind India’s Esha Singh, who won gold. A rankings update on 17 September reported that Bhaker had moved from 10th to fourth in the women’s 25 m pistol since July. At the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya she finished fifth in the women’s 10 m air pistol, which South Korea’s Choo Gaeun won with an Asian record 246.3, the ISSF reported on 23 September.

The ISSF’s athlete database, read in October 2026, lists her with two Olympic bronze medals and 17 World Cup medals: eight gold, four silver and five bronze.