Manu Bhaker’s Mentor Jaspal Rana Passes Away at 49, Indian Shooting Mourns a Legend

Indian shootinglost one of its most important figures on Friday morning when Jaspal Rana passed away at Max Hospital in Saket, New Delhi, at the age of 49, leaving behind a legacy that covers three decades of contribution to the sport and first as one of the most decorated pistol shooters the country has ever produced, and then as the coach who helped Manu Bhaker win two bronze medals at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

Rana had been on the flight back from the ISSFWorld Cup in Munich with the Indian contingent when he fell ill, and the moment the plane landed in New Delhi he was rushed to Max Hospital in Saket where doctors worked to stabilise his condition after placing a stent, but he did not pull through and the hospital confirmed his passing in the early hours of Friday with NRAI president Kalikesh Narayan Singh Deo breaking the news publicly.

He was born in 1976 in Uttarakhand originally came from a family where his father Narayan Singh Rana was both a 1971 war veteran and Uttarakhand's first sports minister, and grew up in a house where sport was taken seriously from the beginning, with his father also serving as his first shooting coach and giving him the foundation that everything else was built on.

What Rana built on that foundation was extraordinary nine gold medals from fifteen total at major international competitions, with the 2006 Asian Games in Doha sitting at the centre of his competitive legacy where he won three golds and a silver across multiple events and equalled the world record in 25m Centre Fire Pistol with 590 points, performances that put his name among the best pistol shooters Asia had ever produced.

Coaching arrived around 2012 and it turned out Rana was as gifted at developing talent as he had been at competing, building a junior programme that put multiple athletes onto the international circuit before taking on Manu Bhaker in 2018 and guiding her all the way to Paris 2024 where she stood on the podium twice, winning double bronze in a performance that the country celebrated for weeks and that Rana had spent years preparing her for through training methods built specifically around replicating Olympic pressure rather than just developing technique.

Sportscape feels that the thirty years in Indian shooting, first as the shooter who made the country care about pistol events and then as the coach who delivered the Paris medals everyone had been waiting for Jaspal Rana gave the sport two complete careers worth of contribution and did not get nearly enough time to see where the next chapter was heading, and the athletes he coached and the young shooters who grew up watching him compete will carry that legacy forward in the only way that genuinely honours it.