Abhinav Bindra

Abhinav Bindra (born 28 September 1982) is an Indian former sport shooter and a businessman. He is an Olympic gold medalist as well as the first and one of only two Indians to win an individual Olympic gold medal. Bindra is also the first Indian to have held concurrently the World and Olympic titles for the men's 10-meter air rifle event, having earned those honors at the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2006 World Championships. Bindra has won seven medals at the Commonwealth Games and three medals at the Asian Games.

With more than 150 medals in his 22-year career, he is the recipient of the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India and is one of the top influencers of sport policy in the country.

At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Bindra finished fourth in the finals of the 10-meter air rifle event. He also served as a goodwill ambassador for the Rio 2016 Olympics Indian contingent, having been appointed to that post by the Indian Olympics Association (IOA). On 5 September 2016, he announced his retirement. Bindra's primary outreach to Indian sports is through the Abhinav Bindra Foundation, a non-profit organization that works to integrate sports, science, and technology into Indian sports and encourage high-performance physical training.

In 2018, Abhinav was bestowed with the prestigious Blue Cross, the ISSF's highest honor. He is also currently a member of the IOC Athletes' Commission. Bindra carried the Olympic torch at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

Bindra was born in Dehradun in Uttarakhand, to a Punjabi Sikh Khatri family. He was educated at the Doon School in Dehradun and at St. Stephen's School in Chandigarh. He studied business administration at the University of Colorado Boulder. Determined to train with the best possible facilities, which were then not available in India, he would train for prolonged periods in Germany, where he was coached by Gaby Buhlmann.

At the age of 15, Bindra was the youngest participant in the 1998 Commonwealth Games. He was also the youngest Indian participant at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. At the 2000 Olympics, he achieved a score of 590, placing him 11th in the qualification round. With that score, he was not able to qualify for the finals. He was also honored with the Arjuna Award that year.

In international competitions, he won his first medal, a bronze, at the 2001 Munich World Cup with a new junior world record score of 597/600. He won six gold medals at various international meets that year and received the prestigious Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna award, India's highest sports award. In the air rifle event at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, he finished with gold in the pairs event and silver in the individual event.

In the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, he broke the previous Olympic record but did not win a medal. He scored 597 in the qualification round and placed third, preceded by Qinan Zhu (599, a new Olympic record) and Li Jie (598). In the finals, Abhinav finished with 97.6 points, last in the field of eight; he was the only player with less than 100 points and dropped to the seventh position.