The 17-Year-old, Ganemat Sekhon still remembers the day when her father Amrinder took her to New Moti Bagh Shooting Range in Patiala for the first time from their Zirakpur home in 2015. There, as her cousin, national-level shooter Indreshwar Singh handed her a double barrel gun, Ganemat’s first shot was followed by a fall due to the gun recoil. As the Punjab youngster became the first Indian female skeet shooter to win a medal at an ISSF World Championship where she won bronze at the women’s skeet event in the ISSF Junior World Championship in Sydney, Australia, on Tuesday, Ganemat was reminded of the incident by her father.

“My father and cousins would always talk about double barrel guns and I wanted to try this sport. When I started, I hit the first shot but fell two feet back after the gun recoiled. But the fact that skeet involved a moving target in opposite directions in outdoor conditions fascinated me. When I won the medal today, my father reminded me of that incident and we laughed. It was a tense final and as the conditions were windy, I missed double targets in the first round,” shared Ganemat.

Since her great grandfather Captain Chattar Singh won royal shooting competitions in the 1940s and grandfather Mohinderpal Singh being a national-level shooter, the youngster always had an interest in shooting. Ganemat started skeet shooting in 2015 and won silver at the Senior National Championships in Pune in 2016 followed by a silver medal at last year’s nationals in New Delhi.