Birthday girl Apurvi Chandela is raring to emulate her idol at Tokyo 2020

India's new generation of young shooters is garnering big hopes for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. With 15 quotas won and a spate of silverware coming along in 2019, expectations have skyrocketed to simply drive out the ghost the luckless ghost that haunted India in Rio 2016.

Since 2018, Indian shooting has grown leaps and bound and one of the brightest spots in the event has been delivered by Apurvi Chandela who turns 27 today. In 2018 World Championships, Apurvi missed a medal by a whisker and was placed fourth below her compatriot Anjum Moudgil, who was the only Indian to win a medal (silver) at the event. But Apurvi managed to become one of the first Indian shooters to win an Olympics quota.

After her resounding success at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Chandela announced herself at the international stage and there was no turning back after that. She won the bronze at the Changwon World Cup a year later which got her an Olympic quota for the 2016 Rio Games. However, a lacklustre performance at Rio saw her finishing 34th after the qualification round.

The Rio setback kept on looming large for Apurvi who couldn't make it to the finals of any ISSF World Cup tournaments for the next two years, with her best finish in that interim being in 10th place at Gabala. However, a comeback was on the cards and her career saw a turn around at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, where she held on to her nerves and showed stern concentration to win the bronze medal, missing out on the gold by just 0.6 points. She further ensured another bronze medal at the Asian Games which happened a few months later in the mixed team 10m Air Rifle event, sharing the acclaim with partner Ravi Kumar.

The turn of the year got even better for the Jaipur-born shooter, as she bagged gold at the ISSF World Cup on home soil in New Delhi and followed that up with a fourth-place finish in Beijing, which bumped her up to the first in the world for her discipline. Chandela further augmented her grip on the top rank with a gold at the Munich World Cup in May and later a mixed team gold at the Rio de Janeiro World Cup in August along with Deepak Kumar.

Coming in shooting arena by taking inspiration from Abhinav Bindra the only Indian individual to have won an Olympics gold medal, Apurvi will be aiming to emulate her idol at the Tokyo 2020.