Sift and the art of keeping it simple

Deepali: Sift, you’re going to the Olympics, and you’re talking about Instagram!

Sift: Apna apna choice hota hai, ma’am. (To each their own)

The coach chuckled, and responded with an “enjoy”, before they hung up.

“Just leave her to do things the way she wants to, and she will be fine,” Deepali later says.

It’s the Sift way — uncomplicated and unfiltered. One that has seen her evolve from being among the promising juniors to one of India’s brightest shooting medal prospects in the three-year Olympic cycle. One with which she shot down the women’s 50m rifle three positions world record score while grabbing the individual gold at last year’s Asian Games. One that started out with a small objective of winning at least one national medal, and which has since morphed into an Olympic-sized hope.

“Even after winning national medals, it was never about the Olympics-Olympics,””Sift says. “It was to find those little steps to walk on and get there. Now that I’m here, it’s a big thing.”

Along came Deepali, the former rifle shooter and Olympian turned coach, to assist her through those steps, without taking away her individuality.

Sift first met Deepali in 2019. Her mother walked up to Deepali and asked her if she’d have a look at her daughter. She did. Deepali’s national commitments — she was part of the Indian team’s coaching group back then — and the approaching Tokyo Olympics meant she couldn’t dedicate much time. Once Deepali began coaching her personally post Tokyo, the relationship kicked off.

Deepali was already working with other shooters — four of her trainees will compete at this Olympics — when Sift, the youngest and newest, joined in.

“For me, it was a bit different with her, and I think it was the same for her too,” Sift says. “Because with everyone else she had worked for years. I was very new to everything.”

Sift was as free-spirited, if not more, back then as she is now. “She was more of a kid then,” Deepali says. “But she had that ability to switch off and back on easily.”

She also had the ability to juggle shooting and studies. When Sift cracked NEET and earned admission to a medical college, she was thrilled. So was Deepali.

“I always tell other shooters also to not come into the sport thinking I just have to shoot, shoot, shoot. It just ends up as unnecessary pressure,” Deepali says. “Sift came into shooting with a free mind. She didn’t come with any baggage, and doesn’t carry any even now.”

Sift would eventually drop out of her academic path even as her shooting journey picked up. She swept individual and team medals at the 2022 Suhl Junior World Cup, an important validation in her last junior event. The junior-senior transition can be tricky in shooting. For Sift it was almost seamless, the key being her scoring consistency as a junior. “When the well-performing juniors try to repeat their scores in the seniors and it doesn’t happen, they start faltering. That didn’t happen with Sift,” Deepali says.

A change of kit in early 2022 in a sport highly equipment oriented helped Sift go “another level”, says Deepali, and into a defining 2023 that comprised medals at the World University Games (WUG), fifth-place finish at the World Championships that secured a Paris quota and the individual gold-team silver Asian Games show.

“A lot of things worked in her favour — the shorter Olympic cycle, postponement of Asian Games,” Deepali says. “In 2022 she was there, but not in that form. That one year gave her time.”

Deepali worked on perfecting Sift’s posture and improving her kneeling position to complement her stronger prone and standing. All through, Sift would have her own ideas, the catch for the coach being to put her point across before her mind was made up. “After that, it is like banging your head against the wall,” Deepali laughs.

“Mein thodi si ziddi types hoon (I’m a bit stubborn),” Sift says. “I’ll first listen to her, take some time to think over it and then offer my suggestions.”

If she thinks it could work, Deepali will be game.

“Then she says: tum Punjab waale (you Punjabi folks) don’t listen to me,” Sift says, smiling. “I tell her, ‘ma’am Punjab waale aise hi hote hai’ (this is how we are).”

That goes for music too. Sift will want to blast her favourite Punjabi numbers during sessions in the range. Maharashtrian Deepali will want a number from ‘Sairaat’ thrown in at some point.

“I’m like, ‘no, yehi chalegi’ (this will play). I was born Punjabi; how is it possible that I listen to anything else?” Sift says, this time with a straight face.

Music battles aside, working with Sift has been “easy” for Deepali. She’s disciplined, open-minded and dials her straight away when she feels the need to. Before her Asian Games golden act, for instance. “Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling great on training day. I wasn’t happy about certain things. So, I called her,” Sift says.

It doesn’t happen too often during competitions — “it’s between me and my mind then” — but for those rare exceptions, Deepali is at her beck and call. The coach goes back to last year, when Sift wasn’t happy with her shooting during a camp in France and was headed to the WUG via a quick stopover to India.

“She said, ‘ma’am you’ll have to come and see’. I said, ‘don’t worry, I’ll come, we’ll fix it’,” Deepali recalls. “She had to leave in the afternoon, so I took an early morning flight to Delhi, met her at the range at 9am and spent two hours fixing whatever needed to.”

It might be hard to believe looking at the easygoing woman from a distance, but Sift does have her low days, she says. The call then goes to her close set of 2-3 friends, not the coach. Deepali respects that. “If they come to me, I talk, not otherwise. Some of my other shooters do,” she says.

Deepali did notice “serious pressure” on Sift’s face in the initial rounds of the four-stage Olympic trials. Even then, she didn’t push the envelope. “We just spoke like we normally do — about technique, what she needed to do.”

Over the last couple of years, Sift has largely seen only the highs, going about her shooting seemingly without a care in the world. The Olympics are however an altogether different world. The first-timer wants to do much the same even there: smile and shoot.

“I’m going to enjoy it like my earlier two Games (WUG and Asian Games),” Sift says. “In both, I won gold. Hopefully, isme bhi accha aaye (here too I do well).”

Since Deepali will not be travelling to Paris, is she expecting another phone call before showtime?

“I hope not,” Deepali laughs. “With Sift, a phone call is never good news.”