Rudrankksh Patil

Some Lesser Known Facts About Rudrankksh Patil

• Rudrankksh Patil is an Indian sports shooter. He gained widespread recognition when he secured a gold medal in the 10m air rifle event at the 2022 ISSF World Championship Rifle/Pistol in Cairo, earning a spot in the Paris 2024 Olympics. This achievement made him only the second Indian to win gold in the 10m air rifle category at the world championships after Olympic champion Abhinav Bindra won it in 2006. In December 2022, when Patil was 18, he went on to become world number one in the Men’s 10m Air Rifle category after winning a gold medal at the ISSF President’s Cup.
• Athletic since childhood, Patil grew up playing multiple sports. When he was a teenager, his parents sent him to summer camps for various sports like swimming, table tennis, chess, badminton, skating, and football. Patil began learning shooting when he was thirteen years old. His dad, Balasaheb, who was a deputy commissioner of police, was asked to inaugurate a shooting range in Thane. At the event, coach Snehal Papalkar suggested that Rudrankksh should give shooting a try. Thereafter, Patil started training under Papalkar at the Dronacharya Sports Academy.
• Interestingly, he stopped playing the sport just a month after he started, but soon, he returned at the insistence of his mother. Talking about the same in an interview, he said,
  

  When I started shooting at the Dronacharya Sports Academy, I did not have much interest. I left it within weeks. When you say shooting, you visualise rolling on the floor, aiming and stuff like in paintball but this was exactly the opposite. Standing in the same spot for so many hours was really boring.”

• Soon, Patil began competing and winning in local and national school competitions.
• In 2017, he started training under Ajit Patil, a coach from Kolhapur who had previously trained national team athletes like Tejaswini Sawant and Rahi Sarnobat. During one of the national school meets Rudrankksh’s parents convinced Ajit to relocate to Thane and become Rudrankksh’s full-time coach. Ajit was facing financial difficulties at that time; therefore, he agreed to the offer. Initially, Rudrankksh and Ajit trained at a shooting range in the western suburbs, which was an hour away from Thane. However, they later shifted their training to a range at a school operated by the People’s Education Society Trust in Thane. This shooting range was modest, with dim lighting and manual targets instead of electronic targets. In an interview, he described the facility and said,
  

  It was a very basic facility. The targets were manual, lighting wasn’t up the mark…So, we set-up a lane for ourselves by first installing new automatic targets and later, with the prize money from some tournaments, installing new lights.”

• In January 2020, he won a gold medal in the 10m air rifle competition for youth under 17 at the Khelo India Youth Games 2020 in Guwahati, Assam.

  

• In 2021, Rudrankksh Patil got a silver medal at the 64th National Shooting Championship Competitions (NSCC) held in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

  

• He secured a silver medal in the 10m air rifle at the 2021 ISSF Junior World Championships in Lima, Peru.
• In May 2022, he won a gold medal in the 10m category at the ISSF Junior World Cup 2022 in Suhl, Germany. Patil, along with Paarth Makhija and Umamahesh Maddineni, also won gold in the men’s air rifle team at the World Cup.

  

• Thereafter, he moved up to the senior team.
• He came seventh in the men’s 10m air rifle event at the Baku Shooting World Cup and eleventh at the Cario World Cup.
• In October 2022, Patil won a gold medal in the 10m air rifle at the 36th National Games of India held in Gujarat. He beat Arjun Babuta of Punjab with a score of 17-7.

  

• In the same month, Patil clinched the gold medal in the 10m category at the 2022 ISSF World Championship Rifle/Pistol in Cairo, Egypt, which earned India a spot in the Paris 2024 Olympics. Patil won the final by defeating Danilo Sollazzo of Italy with a dramatic score of 17-15. During the Championship, Patil also secured gold for India in the 10m air rifle team, along with Arjun Babuta and Kiran Ankush Jadhav. This made Patil only the second Indian sport shooter after Abhinav Bindra in 2006 to win the men’s 10m air rifle World Championship gold medal.

  

• In December 2022, Patil defeated Danilo Sollazzo of Italy in the 10m air rifle final to claim the gold medal at the ISSF President’s Cup 2022 in Cairo, Egypt. With this win, Patil earned the prestigious Golden Target Award, presented to the best athlete of the year in that category by the ISSF. Before the President’s Cup, Patil was ranked second in the ISSF Rankings. This gold medal led Patil to become the world’s number 1 in the ISSF rankings for 10m air rifle shooters.
• In February 2023, Patil secured a gold medal in the 10m air rifle at the ISSF World Cup 2023 in Cairo. He defeated Germany’s Maximilian Ullbrich with a score of 16-8. He also partnered with Narmada Raju to win the 10m air rifle mixed team gold with one of the highest qualification scores ever recorded in the mixed team event (635.8) at the World Cup.
• In March 2023, Patil earned a bronze medal in the 10m air rifle at the ISSF World Cup 2023 held in Bhopal. He also won a bronze in the mixed team air rifle event, competing alongside Narmada Nithin Raju.

  

• In September 2023, Patil, along with Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar and Divyansh Singh Panwar, secured a gold medal for India in the men’s team 10m air rifle at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China. Rudrankksh was the highest scorer among the trio. With this achievement, Patil and Tomar also qualified for the men’s 10m air rifle individual final. In the Men’s 10m air rifle individual final, Patil finished 4th with a score of 208.7.

  

• During his leisure time, he enjoys doing research on Shooting. He explores the sport’s historical background and studies the profiles of fellow athletes.
• In an interview, Patil revealed that he scored more than 90% on his ICSE board 12th-grade examination. He also said that he aspired to appear in UPSC examinations.
• He is a big-time foodie. In an interview, he said,
  

  I consider myself a big foodie. So, wherever I go for competitions, the first thing I do is try the local cuisine. So, food has always been my aim. I have to control my diet before certain matches but there is always an excitement about competitions ending because I get to try different things. I don’t have a favourite, but I am a huge non-vegetarian lover.”

  He also shared that when he felt stressed during a match, he would distract himself by thinking about what was being prepared in the kitchen. He mentioned that eating was one of his favorite pastimes. Interestingly, in the early days, his mother would use food as a way to motivate him to practice shooting.