An innocent question and a mother's grit: The Arya Borse story

Champions are stubborn. With eyes trained on the prize, they pursue their ambitions with dogged determination.

Last week, Arya Borse and Arjun Babuta delivered a commanding performance in the 10m air rifle mixed team final at ISSF World Cup in Munich. They beat the Chinese pair of Sheng Lihao and Wang Zhilin, who had set a world record in the qualification round scoring 635.9 points.

The seeds of this triumph, however, were sown years ago, when as a tenacious eight grader, young Arya confronted her mother: “Why are you not putting me in any sport.”

Madhavi recalls that moment with pride as she tells this writer over the phone that the seemingly innocent question was a defining moment which kickstarted a journey that would set Arya on the path to becoming a competitive shooter.

An unfamiliar world

Madhavi tells The Bridge that little Arya excelled at sport as a youngster.

“At school, she was good at sports and used to get a lot of prizes. So when she asked me, I said, "I am not interested because I am not familiar with the world of sport.”

And yet, the supportive mother that she was, Madhavi enrolled Arya in the pistol shooting club run by Abhay Kamble at the Ashoka Universal School.

“I heard about the pistol shooting club near my house and took her there. I didn’t know much about the sport then. From what I had heard, holding and standing were most important. After four months, when Arya took her first shot, she never looked back,” she asserted.

Slowly it dawned on the family that the sport came with expenditures - a rifle cost Rs 2.5 lakh.

Hailing from Nashik, Maharashtra, the family was as typical a middle class family as any other. Arya's father was a bank employee, who unfortunately lost his job during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Madhavi was an English and fiction teacher at a middle school.

“It was difficult to raise funds for her shooting, but we managed with a Rs 3 lakh loan from the bank to buy her first rifle. It cost Rs 2.5 lakh. We bought her another rifle worth Rs 3.5 lakh. It wasn’t easy. Today when we look back, it feels surreal how I managed to do all these things,” she recalled.

Little did she know at the time that her daughter would cling on to the sport and go on to bring laurels for the national.

A tenacious performer

While the gold medal performance at Munich did catch Madhavi by surprise, she knows all too well that her daughter is a fighter.

"Arya is hardworking and knows how to control her emotions, her thoughts. In Argentina, she had 102 temperature and still she performed. I don’t know where she gets that confidence from since there was no one from a sports background in the family.”

At the National Games in Dehradun early this year, Arya secured two silver medals - in women’s 10m air rifle and in mixed team event with Rudrankksh Patil.

“In Dehradun, her weapon was not working properly and she still managed to win medals,” exclaimed Madhavi.

From that point on, Arya was good to go international.

That said, for someone transitioning to international competitions, the field can be intimidating. But the 22-year old, riding on her gold medal performance from the 2022 Suhl Junior World Cup, displayed a fearless approach enroute to her third successive World Cup medal.

Arya paired with Rudrannksh Patil to win back-to-back silver medals in Buenos Aires and in Lima. She finished fifth in the individual event in Lima.

The precocious performer is currently training at the National Centre of Excellence (NCOE) in Delhi and has secured a sponsorship deal after the national games.

This, according to her mother, has "helped stabilise herself.”

With noteworthy performances on the world stage, Arya has proved that she has what it takes.

Madhavi, on the other hands, beams with unbridled joy. After all, the sacrifices made by her and the family are now bearing fruits.