Sunny Thomas
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
Briefly
Mihir Vasavda, April 30, 2025: The Indian Express
Sunny Thomas was happy teaching English to under-grads at the St. Stephen’s College in Uzhavoor, Kottayam, when he was offered a role that — he once described — was ‘out of syllabus’: To become the coach of India’s shooting team. In a bid to revamp the sport, in doldrums at the time, the National Rifle Association of India (NRAI) took a punt on the English professor, who’d been a shooter with modest domestic achievements, in 1993.
Although unsure if he’ll be able to deliver, Thomas agreed; with one condition. The story goes that Thomas demanded a flight to travel to Delhi, unwilling to spend more than two days on the train from his hometown in Kerala. His wish was granted, reportedly making him one of the first coaches to be given airfare by the government. In the two decades that followed, Thomas helped the sport fly to unprecedented heights.
Indian shooting’s first Dronacharya, Thomas passed away at his home in Uzhavoor after suffering a heart attack. He was 83.
“He was a father figure to generations of Indian shooters,” said Beijing Olympics gold medallist Abhinav Bindra. “He played a big role in my early years and I’ll always be grateful for his support and guidance.”
London Olympics bronze medallist Gagan Narang hailed Thomas as the ‘lighthouse of Indian shooting.’ “He held the sport together in its initial days when it was growing… a lot of shooters, including me, owe their success to him,” Narang said.
“He set up the ethical base for the Indian shooting team,” added former shooter and current India rifle team coach Deepali Deshpande. “He was honest to a fault, was never biased and all of us trusted him blindly.”
The NRAI president Kalikesh Singh Deo said, ‘India would not have become the shooting power that it is today without his selfless contribution to our sport.’
Thomas’s association with shooting began in 1965, when he joined the Kottayam Rifle Club. Already the head of the English department of his college, Thomas became the Kerala state champion five times and in 1976, became the national champion in the Rifle 3 position open sight event. A full-blown career in the sport, though, was never on the mind. However, he remained involved in the national camps until the mid-1980s and was a technical official at the 1982 New Delhi Asian Games.
After a series of flop shows, most notably at the 1990 Asian Games and 1992 Olympics, the then NRAI chief Kumar Surendra Singh and secretary general Baljeet Singh Sethi feared the government would downgrade shooting in its priority list. Out of desperation, they reached out to Thomas to reinvigorate the sport.
Guiding Jaspal Rana
A year after he was appointed, Thomas coached a young Jaspal Rana to the 1994 Junior World Championship gold medal. This was a significant chapter in Indian shooting’s history as it was the first time an Indian had won a gold medal in the competition.
Rana was among the many shooters Thomas would identify and give an opportunity. Narang was another. “I remember getting a call from him one afternoon back in 2003. I was in the Junior Indian team and preparing for a competition in Thailand. He asked me how I was shooting, what my scores were… and suddenly, he asked, ‘Would you like to shoot in the Afro-Asian Games’? I was on cloud 9. I told him, ‘Of course, I would love to shoot,’” said Narang, who went on to win the gold medal at the only edition of the Games, held in his hometown, Hyderabad.
Unlike today, when there’s a specialised coach for each of shooting’s disciplines — rifle, pistol and shotgun — Thomas wore all three hats. And played a role, direct or indirect, in some of the biggest moments in Indian sport. He shared the frame with Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, when he won the double trap silver at the Athens Olympics. He was with the national team when Bindra won the gold in Beijing and then again when Narang and Vijay Kumar won bronze and silver respectively at the 2012 London Olympics, after which Thomas retired.
Thomas, his wards said, wasn’t a coach in the conventional sense of the word. India’s top shooters had foreign coaches in their corners. But Thomas would act as the ‘bridge between the shooters and the federation’ and, with his impeccable communication and management skills, pulled everyone in the same direction.
“He was essentially India’s first high-performance director,” Bindra added. “He understood the athletes, their requirements, mindset… He was an empathetic person who understood the different personalities that made up the team and then he dealt with each one of them in a very nice way, which then saw the results slowly but surely starting to come.”
In 2001, Thomas became the first shooting coach to be conferred with the Dronacharya Award. Nineteen years later, in 2020, Rana – one Thomas’s first prodigies – was given the same honour. An emotional Rana said back then he ‘owed everything’ to Thomas. It’s a sentiment many in Indian shooting would share.
