Skeet Champ Anantjeet Singh Naruka on Learning from Loss and More

Skeet shooting is a sport built on disappearance. A clay target is released, arcs briefly across the sky, and is gone, either shattered or intact, the difference settled in a fraction of a second. There is no review, no replay, no margin for renegotiation. Anantjeet Singh Naruka knows this better than most. A triple gold medallist at the Asian Championships, a silver and bronze medallist at the Asian Games, and a World Cup Final bronze medallist. The hardware is substantial, and yet, in Paris, all of it collapsed into a single number. He found out exactly what that unforgiving arithmetic looks like up close.

He missed by one.

The scoreboard read 44 to 43, a margin so negligible, it almost feels like god’s own little joke, yet impossible to shrug off.  "It's disheartening," Naruka says. "When you are so close to winning a medal." The loss could have metastasised, as sporting losses often do. Naruka refused to let it.

Anantjit Singh Naruka

"We'll remember this," he says. "We'll take it forward." It sounds almost clinical, but in skeet, that kind of separation isn't stoicism for its own sake, it's survival. A full round runs 125 targets. One miss doesn't end a competition, but the doubt it seeds can. "You start questioning yourself. There's a doubt in your head and you have to let it go, because the next target is in the air within seconds." The discipline isn't philosophical. It's structural. Miss the shot, then immediately stop caring that you missed the shot.

Those instincts had been assembling themselves long before Paris. As a schoolboy in Jaipur, Naruka moved through sports without committing to any of them: golf, table tennis, squash, cricket. He was good without being serious. Shooting thought, wasn't something he sought out. He grew up in a royal family in Rajasthan, where guns were already part of the furniture. His father, a former skeet shooter, supplied the nudge. “Since we are around guns so much," he told his me, "why don't you try your luck in skeet shooting?"”

The first round clicked. "It felt really good," Naruka recalls. "I understood the basic steps… I did really well for the first time." He was young enough that the gun looked comically oversized against his frame. "The gun was bigger, longer than me," he laughs. "Everyone had a good laugh about it."

That early spark, however, met the peculiar resistance that shapes every Indian shooter's career. "Given the laws in India, we can only import 15,000 cartridges in a year," he says. "Which is very less to compete professionally." At the level he operates, the requirement is several times that, 70,000 to 80,000 rounds annually. Naruka's solution has been to spend extended stretches in Europe, primarily Italy, training without restriction, then returning home to the familiar constraints. "You have to make the most out of it," he says.

It's with that philosophy, not despite it, that he shot his first Nationals and came away with a bronze. However, while the world may have seen it as a sign of all that is to come, Naruka himself didn't read it as prophecy. "When I started, I used to take it lightly," he says. "I didn't know there's so much competition."

That repose wouldn't survive the pandemic. Locked in and forced to reckon with what he actually wanted, Naruka emerged with a different disposition. "After COVID, it really hit me… you have to take this more seriously," he says. "I couldn't just do it—I had to live it." The adjustments weren't theatrical. Tighter conditioning to hold focus over long rounds. More deliberate repetition, not just of the physical motion but of the mental one. The insistence that it is in those moments of failure, that the athlete is actually assembled. "All your losses are a good experience for you to learn."

Paris, inevitably, is still the clearest lesson. "That memory really comes back," he says. "But of course it drives me… next time if I'm there, I'm not going to put myself in the same situation." Later that season, at the World Cup Final in Delhi, the situation returned almost exactly. The contest tightened, the score edged toward bronze, and something in him held. "I was like, no, this time you're not losing this medal. You can't come fourth."

He didn't. The medal sat where it should have been all along.

That's the thing about skeet and perhaps about Naruka. On the biggest stages of world sport, talent is only the entry fee. What separates the medallist from fourth is something far more decisive: the ability to pull the trigger without thinking twice.