New Delhi, Sep 15: There was a time when Mairaj Ahmad Khan dreamed of making it big with a cricket bat. More than three decades later, the 50-year-old is still chasing sporting glory — only now with a shotgun firmly in his grip.
From Khurja in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district to shooting ranges around the world, Mairaj’s journey has taken him places he could never have imagined when he first stepped into the world of sport.
At the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, he will be the second-oldest member of the Indian contingent, behind equestrian Shruti Vora, and will compete at his fourth continental games.
Yet, shooting was never supposed to be his destiny.
“I was playing cricket when it all started in 1994,” Mairaj recalls.
A left-handed top-order batter who usually came in at No. 3, he represented Uttar Pradesh in the CK Nayudu and Vinoo Mankad Trophy competitions before joining Jamia Millia Islamia in 1996. He played inter-university cricket and also featured in the Vizzy Trophy.
Among his university teammates was a young Virender Sehwag.
“I have played with Sehwag and done a lot of nets with him. He played just one match with us because he went on to play for India that year,” Mairaj recalled.
But while cricket was his passion, shooting was slowly beginning to pull him in.
Guns were not unfamiliar to Mairaj. His family, he says, were zamindars and had always kept firearms.
As a youngster, he had also tried air rifle and .22 rifle shooting and even competed in a district-level three-position event in Bulandshahr, where he won Rs 30 in prize money.
“I bought a cricket bat with that money,” he said laughing.
It was after he moved to Delhi that fate nudged him towards a different sporting path.
Mairaj would often spend weekends with a cousin who was a Group Captain in the Indian Air Force and a senior officer with the Air Force Sports Control Board. One day, he noticed his cousin cleaning his gun.
“I asked him where he was going. He said there was a competition at the Delhi range… the Nationals at Karni Singh Shooting Range. So I went there out of curiosity,” he said.
What he saw fascinated him.
The range was buzzing with some of India’s leading shooters, including Asian Games shotgun gold medallist Raja Randhir Singh, Olympian Gurbir Singh — father of former trap world champion Manavjit Singh Sandhu — and Zorawar Singh Sandhu’s father, who was also a prominent figure in the sport.
“I felt very fascinated by the sport,” he says.
The idea of competing himself took firmer shape a year later.
In 1995, Mairaj’s family was running a restaurant at Pragati Maidan, now Bharat Mandapam, along with two kiosks and a kebab outlet called ‘Hamari Gali’.
One day, some relatives walked into the restaurant after returning from a shooting Pre-Nationals competition.
“They told me they had competed and qualified. I made up my mind that from the next year I would also compete. So, they entered my name.”
For the next few years, Mairaj dabbled in both trap and skeet. Then came the moment that changed everything.
In 1999, at a competition in Chennai, Mairaj found himself in a skeet shoot-off against Ronjan Sodhi, who would later go on to win Asian Games gold in double trap and receive the prestigious Khel Ratna award.
“I missed the first double shots. I thought he (Ronjan) would win. But he also could not shoot both his targets. In the next round, I went on to win.”
That victory settled the matter.
“After that, skeet became my life. I never picked up the trap gun again and switched full-time to skeet in 1999.”
The decision transformed his life.
“Today, whatever I am is because of skeet. My name, my fame,” said Mairaj who became the first ever Indian athlete to qualify for the Olympics in the shotgun skeet discipline in 2016 Rio edition.
The sport took him to two Olympics and brought him World Cup medals, including a gold and a silver. But the journey has come with its share of setbacks — and, like any long sporting career, its share of heartbreak.
Mairaj missed out on the Asian Games in Jakarta in 2018 and Hangzhou in 2022, losing his place by narrow margins.
“I was very disappointed. I lost the berth by a close margin.”
Now, after those misses, he is back on the continental stage.
His first Asian Games appearance came in Doha in 2006. At Incheon in 2014, he came agonisingly close to a medal, finishing fifth in the final. At 50, however, he refuses to burden himself with expectations.
“I am just going as a new shooter,” he said with a laugh.
There is no grand declaration, only quiet faith.
“Inshallah. I always have faith in him.”
Perhaps nothing captures Mairaj’s remarkable longevity better than the 35-year age gap between him and Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the teenage cricket sensation and youngest member of India’s Asian Games contingent.
“When I started shooting, he (Sooryavanshi) would have been born around that time,” Mairaj said.
The comparison is almost poetic. Sooryavanshi is following the same path Mairaj once dreamed of — a young cricketer trying to make his mark.
So, does the veteran have some advice for the teenager?
“Fifty is the new 20, you know. He has youth, but I have experience,” Mairaj said with a laugh.
Then comes the line that perhaps sums up his entire journey better than anything else: “Unke andar josh hai aur mere andar hosh hai (He has the passion. I have the wisdom).”
And after three decades, two Olympics, four Asian Games and a sporting journey that began with a cricket bat bought for Rs 30, the veteran shooter is still chasing the next target.
