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35 and still young: Trap shooter Kynan Chenai refuses to slow down
Asian Games-bound shooter Kynan Chenai, 35, is embracing a younger Indian trap team, but age has done little to dim his obsession with shooting, his competitive fire or his dream of returning to the Olympics.
Alexander Zverev had just the US Open final, but for a few seconds, he did not know it.
The German had been so absorbed in the match against Ben Shelton, so deep into the process of playing the final point, that the result had not quite registered. It was a moment that went viral. Kynan Chenai remembers it for a different reason.
For a trap shooter, that is the place you want to be.
“You're just numb. You're just going through your process, you're going through what you need to do,” Chenai tells IndiaToday.in.
In shooting, he explains, the hardest moments are when the mental game begins. One target. One chance. No room for the mind to wander.
“When that one target comes, you have to be mentally so strong that you feel nothing.”
Chenai will be looking for that feeling when he arrives in Japan for the Asian Games.
At 35, he is the oldest member of India's men's trap team. Ahvar Rizvi is 26. Shapath Bharadwaj is 23. The previous Asian Games team had included Zoravar Singh Sandhu, who was 46 in 2023, and Prithviraj Tondaiman, who was 36.
Chenai has moved into the senior bracket almost without noticing it. He does not particularly like the idea.
“I like to be in my head one of the young ones with them,” he says. “So I try to keep up with them as much as I can and try to beat them most of the time.”
The younger shooters, he says, make sure he cannot take anything for granted.
“They're good, so they keep me on my toes also.”
Then he laughs.
“This new generation is coming into the shooting team. I am saying ‘new generation’, but I'm not that old yet!”
Chenai will compete in the men's individual trap, men's team event and mixed team event in Japan. He and Neeru Dhanda will form India's mixed trap pair, while Ahvar and Shapath join him in the men's team.
The men's trap team will be defending its Asian Games title. Chenai will also return as the individual bronze medallist from the previous Games.
His year has had its share of ups and downs. He shot 119 in qualification at the World Cup in Tangier to finish 13th, just outside the final field. At Lonato, he finished 71st in the individual event after shooting 116. He and Neeru finished 18th in the mixed team event.
There has been enough competition around him to make the selection difficult. Chenai knows that as well as anyone.
“Guys like me, Prithviraj... we are the older ones now,” he says. “And we've got to really shoot those big scores if we want to make the team, otherwise you're not making the team in India anymore.”
It is a different Indian shotgun set-up from the one Chenai entered years ago. The scores at domestic selection trials have risen, he says. The younger shooters are coming through and making the established names work harder.
“Our shotgun team is more professional, more enthusiastic, a lot more energy,” Chenai says.
“So, don't count us out. We've got something up our sleeves.”
Chenai has been shooting for 25 years. He started young, and the relationship with the sport has changed considerably since then.
The younger Kynan was not particularly interested in keeping his emotions in check.
“When I was much younger, I used to take on a lot of pressure, and I used to have a lot of aggression towards the game,” he says.
The love for shooting, though, was always there.
“I love the game. Even then I loved the game, now I love the game also. I am actually obsessed with the game.”
“I find the obsession fun. I find the drive to get up and go and shoot in the morning and come back home, however hot it is, however cold it is... I find it fun to have the gun in my hand and actually break targets.”
There is a difference between loving a sport and understanding it.
Chenai believes age has given him the latter.
“I've shot for now 25 years. It's changed in terms of experience a lot; it's changed in terms of how I approach the game.”
When he was younger, the sport was about something else. Now, there is more perspective.
“You grow up as a man, you grow up as a family man now, and you tend to think of things a little bit differently. The importance of certain things within the game changes.”
The technical side changes too. So does the mental side.
“One matures in skill, one matures in your technique, one matures in your mental space.”
“Most of the time we don't have the time to look back. But when you get a chance to sit and look back, it's very, very entertaining to see how you've changed,” he says.
Shotgun shooting is an unforgiving sport to explain to someone who has never watched it closely. The target is moving. The shooter does not know its direction until it appears. Weather and light can change the conditions. And the window to react is tiny.
Chenai has the numbers ready.
“We're shooting a 12-gauge shotgun, which a shell travels at 500 feet per second, and we're shooting a target which comes out of a machine at 100 kilometres an hour, and you have 0.6 of a second to break the target before it leaves your range.”
The direction is unknown until the target appears.
“So, the statistics, the logic of it is you have to be very fast with your reflexes, your eyes, etc. So, that's where the technique comes in.”
Then comes the mind.
“When tough times come, that's when the mental game begins because it just boils down to one target in the end of the day.”
The work begins long before competition.
During the current preparation, the Indian team has spent 10 days training in Delhi. On a hot day, the shooters can reach the range around 7 or 8am and stay until about 1pm. There is rest afterwards, followed by physical work and a psychological session in the evening.
They shoot four or five days a week during the heavier training periods, before reducing the workload closer to competition.
“You put in the amount of shells, you put in the amount of brain space into your technique, and then see what happens when exam day comes.”
The coaches are part of the mental preparation too.
Chenai works with team psychologist, and has also had a mental coach, Lorenzo Beltrame, for several years. Beltrame worked with him around the 2016 Olympics.
But when Chenai is actually on the range, he places enormous trust in his coaches. His personal coach is David Kosteleck, while Peter Wilson is the team coach.
“Your coaches, your technical coach... end up being your mental coach,” he says.
“They are with you all the time and they tend to tell you how it is. They tell you straight what you need to do, like, either you need to man up and get on with it, or they calm you down when you need to be calmed down.”
The psychology is complicated. The process is not.
“Follow the process, you shoot every target with the best of your ability, and then we'll see the results on the cards fall.”
He does not pretend the results do not matter.
“Everybody wants results. Nobody is saying... If they're telling you that they don't want results, they're lying to you!”
He wants medals. He wants to win. But the target in front of him is always the target in front of him.
“As an athlete, as a sportsman, you prepare to do your best in terms of who you are and you go against yourself. Results will come and go. That is part of the game.”
Chenai has watched Indian shooting change from close quarters. He has been part of Khelo India, an NCOE and the TOP Scheme. Now he is watching younger athletes come through those systems and make national teams.
Chenai says the difference is visible not only in the number of athletes but in the infrastructure around them.
“Khelo India, all the NCOE, Khelo India, all these schemes that we've got going on in the system are bringing up such young athletes, and they're bringing out into the national team.”
There was a time, he recalls, when even getting permission to shoot could become a process.
“Now it's very, very different. You can actually be a professional athlete in India,” he says.
That has also changed the competitive environment inside shotgun shooting. Chenai says India's rifle and pistol programme has thousands of athletes to choose from at the national level, while shotgun has a much smaller pool.
But he believes the standard in shotgun is rising rapidly.
“If you look at the scores in shotgun, they have gone up considerably.”
That makes selection harder for him too. And perhaps that is exactly how he wants it.
He is going to Japan with Ahvar and Shapath, not to teach them how to shoot, but to compete with them.
“It's nice to have young people who bring a different sort of energy.”
There is another young, successful presence in Chenai's Asian Games campaign. Neeru, the 26-year-old from Haryana, has just won World Cup gold in Lonato, and she will partner Chenai in the mixed trap event.
They have already shot together at Lonato and spent the recent 10-day camp training alongside each other.
“We know pretty much how each other shoots, what to say before the rounds,” Chenai says.
“We're pretty decently gelled between each other.”
The Lonato result did not go their way. They finished 18th. Neeru, however, returned from the tournament with an individual gold medal.
Chenai saw that as fuel for the group.
“She is just coming off a lovely gold medal that she won in the Lonato World Cup, which is very driving for us all.”
Three events await Chenai in Japan. Individual trap. Men's team. Mixed team.
He already knows what an Asian Games medal feels like. He knows what it feels like to stand on an Olympic range too, having competed at Rio 2016.
What he does not seem to know is when he will stop wanting another chance.
There are no short-term targets, he says.
“I only have long-term goals.”
The Olympic dream is still there.
“The Olympic Games is something which is a dream of mine. I mean, I'll never let that go. I want to go again, I want to do well there.”
Twenty-five years into shooting, Chenai is still getting up in the morning to do the thing he loves.
There are younger shooters beside him now. He wants to beat them. There are medals he has already won. He wants more. There is an Olympic Games he has already experienced. He wants another.
And there is still a target in front of him.
“It's always going to burn, yeah. The fire never goes out.”