(Jhelum) She inhales slowly, holds her breath and squeezes the trigger: beyond her target, Kishmala Talat wants to become Pakistan’s first female Olympic medalist athlete by wielding a pistol, a weapon usually reserved for men in this conservative country.
At 21, the young woman will compete in the Paris Games in pistol shooting at 10 and 25 meters. But she has already removed several taboos with her weapon, thanks to the unwavering support of her mother, a commander in the Pakistani army with thwarted sports shooting dreams.
In Pakistan, Kishmala Talat told AFP, “girls are expected to stay at home, do girl things and play with dolls while boys play with guns.”
At the Jhelum shooting center – nicknamed “The City of Martyrs” as it is a stronghold of the army – she says today: “I don’t see anyone as my competitor, I am in competition with myself “.
At the 2022 Asian Games, Kishmala Talat won Pakistan’s first-ever shooting medal: bronze. In Paris, she wants to go even further.
“I want to be recognized, I want to do more,” she says, before shooting, one eye covered by tight-fitting glasses and one hand in her pocket. “I want when we talk about ‘shooting’ or ‘Kishmala’, we think of someone who has done something great for Pakistan.”
In this country, guns are everywhere. According to a study by the Small Arms Survey, in 2017, the country had nearly 44 million weapons – with or without a license – in the hands of civilians. In a country now home to more than 240 million people, that’s 22 guns per 100 people, the fourth highest rate in the world.
But sports shooting is not developed. It is cricket that draws crowds to stadiums and field hockey that brings in medals: eight of the ten Olympic medals, the last of which was won by a Pakistani in 1992.
The young communications graduate is currently ranked 37th in the world at 10 meters and 41st at 25 meters, according to the International Shooting Sports Federation.
But she hopes to improve her scores with hard training for ten hours a day: an hour of physical exercises, four hours of each shot and an hour of meditation at the end of the day. Eyes fixed on the flame of a candle, she learns to keep her mind focused on a single point, her target.
“I will do my best to make Pakistan shine,” she assures.
For its training, it benefits from the support of the Pakistani army – the sixth largest in the world in terms of manpower, whose large budget allows it to manage ski resorts, polo fields and mountaineering schools.
For Kishmala Talat, she mobilized training officers, a foreign trainer and gave her access to one of her training centers in Jhelum, about a hundred kilometers from her hometown, Rawalpindi, the garrison town which adjoins the capital Islamabad.
Her mother, Samina Yaqoob, who remembers, with tears in her eyes, her daughter’s qualification for the 2024 Olympics, herself once dreamed of sports shooting.
And then, says this officer in the army health services, “I got married and I got busy with life. But I am happy to see my daughter achieving her dream.”
“Girls must put themselves forward, observe, work hard and their parents must support them,” she pleads.
And because of that upbringing, she says, her daughter “knows she can do anything.”