On Thursday night, Jaypal Malviya’s parents will likely discover he has been living a lie. As far as they know, over the past few years, he had been preparing for the state civil services examinations and, later, working a modest office job in Bhopal, earning 20,000 rupees a month.

When he told them he had to travel to Doha a few weeks ago, he said it was for office work. “Sir ke saath ja raha hu. Thoda office me kaam aya hai, (I’m going with my seniors. There’s some work in office),” he had told them.

News indeed does travel slowly to Chandangaon, a village about three kilometres from the mofussil town of Chhindwara in the south of Madhya Pradesh. Jaypal, for his part, has done everything he can to avoid publicity and media coverage. But a World Championship medal and an Olympic quota are not things that can be kept under wraps for long.

Jaypal’s parents will soon learn that their son is a pistol shooter, that he has never held a job, and that the money they gave him for his studies went towards buying a pistol — all this as they get to know that their son has just won a silver medal in the men’s 10m air pistol event at the ISSF World Championships, along with India’s first shooting quota for the 2028 Olympics.

Jaypal kept his life hidden because he believed he knew exactly how his parents would have reacted if they knew he had one. “I know they would have been against it. Where I’m from, no one even knows what shooting is. They probably think it’s something to do with film shooting,” he told Sportstar a few days before leaving for the World Championships.

His parents would not have been the only ones to disapprove. Almost everyone he has encountered over the course of his sporting journey seemed to think Jaypal was crazy. They wouldn’t have been entirely wrong.

Five years ago, when Jaypal decided he wanted to become a competitive pistol shooter, he was already 26 years old. He was starting at an age when most athletes are either established or winding down their careers.

His only previous experience with shooting had come a few years earlier, when, as an NCC cadet, he had fired .22-calibre and .303-calibre rounds from bolt-action rifles and carbines.

“I remember I had won a battalion competition and the instructor had said my 4.5 centimetre grouping was the best he had seen. But I was from a small village in Madhya Pradesh. I had no idea that shooting was even a sport or how I would pursue it,” he says.

He put the idea aside. He had been studying for the MPCSE (Madhya Pradesh Civil Services Examination) and, even in 2020, was hoping to secure a government job. But the examinations that year were postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The following year, they were cancelled after a paper leak.

RELATED: Jaypal Malviya bags first Olympic quota in shooting, wins 10m air pistol silver medal at the ISSF World Championship

“When I couldn’t write the exam, I felt I needed to do something else,” he says.

Fortuitously, around that time, Jaypal remembers reading an article in the local newspaper that arrived in Chandangaon. A pistol shooter who had trained in Jabalpur was setting up a shooting range at his home, not far from the village.

“I thought, let me go there. At the worst, it will be fun,” he remembers thinking.

When he picked up a pistol, however, Jaypal quickly discovered that his aptitude for rifle shooting had carried over. “The rifles I had shot in the NCC had all been open-sighted ones. So I didn’t feel there was that much of a difference in shooting a pistol. You again don’t aim through a sight, and the only difference I felt was that I had a shorter barrel to aim over,” he says.

At the academy, Jaypal also learnt just how much ground he had to make up. “I didn’t have any idea about competing in the sub-junior and junior categories before coming into the senior level. I was immediately competing against shooters who had been competing for many years,” he says.

Starting with a lie

Jaypal soon realised that if he wanted to compete seriously, he needed a pistol of his own. He found someone willing to sell him a second-hand Walther for Rs 1.05 lakh. It was less than half the price of a new pistol, but still more money than he had.

So he lied.

“My family farms in Chandangaon, and it was the time of the wheat harvest. I took that money we got from selling the wheat and told my parents I needed it to pay for my Civil Services Classes,” he says.

There was no other option, he says. “I knew if I told them I needed it for shooting, there was no way they would have given it. I was already 26 years old then. People would have said, this was the time to get a job, to get married. Not to start something new,” he says.

But Jaypal backed himself. He still uses the same pistol today. When he realised he needed better training facilities, he moved to Bhopal to train at the State Shooting Academy. The jibes he had hoped to avoid followed him there.

“The range workers would tell me, ‘Diwar pe sir patak rahe ho. (You are hitting your head against a wall). You have no backup. You have no support. If you don’t succeed here, what are you going to do?’,” he recalls.

He admits there was some truth to their words. “I knew that people quit the sport by the time they are 22 or 23. They start the sport at 15 or 16. No one starts at 26,” he says.

Racing against time, he was also battling financial constraints. “Everything I did was done keeping in mind that I didn’t have a lot of money. I shot with the lowest quality pellets. I didn’t have money to train every day at the range, so I would practise maybe 25 days at most before a tournament. The rest of the time I would train by myself,” he says.

He couldn’t ask his parents for help. He had already told them that he had a job in Bhopal. What helped him most was a close circle of friends. “I had friends who had been studying with me. Some of them now had jobs in the civil services and some in the armed forces. They would help me with money every month. They never expected that I would pay it back. They just told me to chase my dream,” he says.

Those days were difficult, but Jaypal persevered. He made his first senior nationals in his second year of training. Slowly, he began making his presence felt at national-level competitions, earning the right to compete in the selection trials for the Indian team. He began winning there, too.

All the while, he was counting every rupee. Even when travelling to New Delhi for national selection trials, he took the general-class train. Because of his age, he has never been picked up for a job that might have made his training easier. To this day, he does not have a personal coach, although he has finally secured a sponsor.

On the strength of his scores, he made his first Indian team at the ISSF World Cup in Hangzhou. Although he shot a credible 585, he finished just outside the top eight who qualified for the final.

There was a silver lining to that, he reckons. “I like to keep a low profile. I avoid speaking to the media or even getting my picture taken because I don’t want anything to get to my family. If they find out, there will be a hundred things to answer. Best avoid all this,” he told Sportstar.

Although he did not make the team for the Asian Games, he got another opportunity at the World Championships. At 31, with a receding hairline, Jaypal was the oldest debutant in the Indian squad. His goal was clear. “Mera sapna hai Olympics khelna (It is my dream to play the Olympics). Olympic quota leke ana hai (I have to win the Olympic quota),” he told Sportstar.

It was no easy task.

India had struggled at the World Championships in the opening days, with no medals or Olympic quotas to show for its efforts in the Olympic events. The Indian women’s pistol shooters had also failed to reach the podium or secure a quota earlier on Thursday.

No nerves

But when Jaypal stepped up to the range, he showed little sign of nerves, shooting 585 to qualify for the final in third place. He got off to a slow start in the final and was fifth when the elimination series began. But he kept pushing. A run of high scores, including 10.7 and 10.8, followed by 10.3 and 10.7 between his 15th and 18th shots, brought him within 0.5 points of China’s Hu Ku.

An 8.7 from the Chinese shooter narrowed the gap further to just 0.1. Gold was suddenly within reach for the Indian, but it was not to be. Hu pulled ahead with his final couple of shots to win 243.9 to Jaypal’s 242.2.

What Jaypal had already achieved was remarkable enough. The medal was special, of course, but so was the Olympic quota he had secured for India. It does not guarantee that he will be the one to travel to Los Angeles; the quota belongs to the country, not the individual athlete.

Jaypal, however, isn’t thinking that far ahead. For now, with a World Championship medal around his neck, he will be wondering what he is going to tell his parents.

“I didn’t want my parents to find out about what I was doing until the Olympics. The more people find out about what I’m doing, there are that many more problems. If it were up to me, I’d just keep my head down and continue working towards the Olympics,” he says.

Published on Nov 06, 2026