The Jabalpur native, 25, was unable to maintain her balance when shooting at the target since she was born with talipes, also known as club foot.
Rubina Francis had a childhood fantasy of becoming Olympic medallist shooter Gagan Narang. However, at the time, just being able to remain still on her feet was a great difficulty, so earning a medal on the grandest platform was an ambitious goal. The 25-year-old Jabalpur resident was unable to maintain her balance when shooting at the target since she was born with talipes, also known as club foot. She was not able to fire accurately while seated, which just made her problems worse. “We attempted to have her sit and shoot, but that wasn’t ideal,” her coach JP Nautiyal said in a private conversation with PTI.Bewildered by the current situation, Rubina appeared to have to give up her long-held goal of becoming a shooter.
However, her coaches had an idea for a fix.
“We made her stand and got special shoes for her which facilitated balance,” Nautiyal said.
Rubina and her coaches put forth a lot of effort into improving her posture when she could barely stand still.
Her efforts paid off on Saturday when she won a bronze medal in the women’s 10m air pistol (SH1) event, making history as the nation’s first female pistol shooter to win a Paralympic medal.Every successful athlete, it is said, has a strong support network that propels them on; in Rubina’s case, that network consisted of her parents.
Despite their financial difficulties, her mother, a nurse, and father, a former garage owner, encouraged her goals.
Rubina ended up in the MP Shooting Academy in 2015, where she thrived under the tutelage of famous coach Jaspal Rana’s younger brother Subhash and mentorship of Nautiyal.”In February 2017, we brought her to Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, for the World Cup after she achieved a score of 386 in the 2016 nationals. When she was a junior, Nautiyal stated, “she not only made it to the final but also set a junior world record.”
Since then, Rubina hasn’t looked back, taking home two medals in the Para World Championships in Lima, Peru, and the Para Asian Games in China, where she won bronze.
