Suma Shirur opens Axis Bank Lakshya Shooting Club High Performance Centre in Belapur

Suma Shirur on Wednesday unveiled the Axis Bank Lakshya Shooting Club High Performance Centre in Belapur, Navi Mumbai.

Two decades after launching the Lakshya Shooting Club, Shirur said a red state transport bus that once carried her from Panvel to Dadar for practice has come to symbolise how far she has travelled in pursuing better resources for Indian shooters. Olympic medallist Gagan Narang inaugurated the seven-storied facility in the presence of six other Olympians and several shooting stalwarts.

The High Performance Centre includes two modern shooting ranges, a sports science laboratory, a gym, a mind gym, a Pilates studio, residential accommodation and a lounge, and has been designed as a one-stop destination for aspiring shooters. The project is supported by Axis Bank and the Government of Maharashtra and is intended to give athletes the infrastructure and expertise needed to compete at the highest level.

Reflecting on the gap in facilities available to her generation, Shirur said, "Like all the Olympians from my generation will agree, we never had access to anything. We only saw others using it and wished we had the same." She added a personal motivation for the project, saying, "I would like to create things that I never got."

Shirur said her ambitions extend beyond serving Lakshya's existing athletes and that the centre would welcome shooters who aspire to represent India. "I don’t want them to run around the world. I want them to come here and be a part of Lakshya Shooting Club," she said.

The centre will start with a small residential intake of six to eight athletes and will run a high-performance programme for shooters on the brink of international competition, alongside a development squad for talented athletes aged 13 to 19.

Narang, who cut the ribbon, described the facility as the product of years of hard work, sacrifice and belief and paid tribute to Shirur’s husband, Siddharth, an architect who helped translate her vision into a physical space. "Your circumstances may limit your resources. But they should never limit your dreams," Narang told the young athletes.

Shirur said the next challenge is to make the centre financially sustainable so that monetary constraints do not prevent access, and she expressed a desire to integrate technology more deeply into training to help coaches analyse performance and accelerate development. "This is just the beginning," she said, looking towards a future in which the centre helps Indian shooting become a global powerhouse.