Olympic Day 2017: Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore shoots silver

NEW DELHI: On the occasion of International Olympic Day, TOI Sports is recapping some of the glorious Indian moments at the Summer Games over the years. In this instalment, a look back at Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore's silver medal in the men's Double Trap at the 2004 Athens Games.
Lieutenant-Colonel Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore first stepped in a shooting range in 1998. Six years later, he became India's first ever individual silver medal winner at an Olympic Games, claiming second position in the Men's Double Trap at Athens 2004.
Rathore had qualified for the final in fifth position with a score of 135 and in the final he sealed a historic silver medal by shooting 44 points to end with a cumulative score of 179 and became the poster boy for the Indian army. Ahmed Al Maktoum handed the UAE its first ever gold medal at the Olympics, shooting 189 to equal the Games record.
Born in to an army family, Rathore cleared the National Defines Academy examination and served in the Indian army, once leading a team in tracking militants in Kashmir. The unit he was part of had killed 300 terrorists. By 2008, Rathore shifted his focus to the double trap event and went on to capture the individual and pair gold at the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games. A year before his Olympic success, he had won gold at the 2003 World Cup in Sydney.
After taking premature retirement from the Indian army, Rathore joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2013 and was sworn-in as Minister of State for Information & Broadcasting in 2014.
Abhinav Bindra, who remains India's only individual Olympic gold medalist, and Saina Nehwal, who in 2012 won the country its first badminton medal, have both singled out Rathore's pathbreaking achievement in Athens as personal inspirations.