The Paris Olympics Chateauroux shooting centre - 300kms south of Paris, almost three hours by train in the heart of provincial France - is being called by an Indian shooting star as the place "from where you can see the end of the world."
On Sunday afternoon, Manu Bhaker's bronze medal brought Indian shooting back - if not quite from the end of the world, certainly from the bottom of the Olympic pit where it has spent the last 12 years flagellating itself and being flagellated.
Manu is the first Indian woman to win an Olympic shooting medal and that fact in itself is as absurd as the absence of Indian shooting medals across three OIympic cycles.
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This stumbling across Rio and Tokyo led to the shooters being mocked as spoilt children of the Indian Olympic programme, who burnt though a stash of cash and soared in their little international cocoon but, at the Olympics, ended up way off target. Why, two weeks before Paris there were mumblings that these kids - 17 debutants among the 21 - would not have it in them to cross any lines. As for the oldies, they were burnt out and way beyond finished.
It took Manu's gritted teeth fighting final to banish the negativity around Indian shooting and achieve many things all at once. Firstly, Manu's performance became early shots fired for her sport in Paris, announcing itself on day two with the promise of more. If the Indians are to aim for double digit medals from Paris, shooting will have to contribute with its own record haul.
Bookending Manu's final today were Ramita Jindal and Arjun Babuta's qualifications for the men's and women's 10m air rifle finals tomorrow. Three Olympic shooting finals is as far as India have ever gone and that was at London 2012. This first Paris medal would also have sent a rush of relief and confidence through the rest of the contingent.
Allez l'Inde.
Manu's bronze is also a belated tribute to our women shooters because they made the first breakthroughs in Olympic shooting reaching finals. Anjali Bhagwat in Sydney 2000, Suma Shirur in Athens 2004 and only then came the male medallists - Rajyavardhan Rathore, Abhinav Bindra, Gagan Narang and Vijay Kumar. Today Manu stood tall for the many Indian women shooters who have strived and fallen short at the Games before her.
Manu's coach Jaspal Rana will have a satisfied chuckle too. Rana, an incredibly talented and controversy-a-day enfant terrible of Indian shooting in his heyday as a competitor is now quite the sage who Manu returned to after a falling-out before Tokyo 2020. Rana is at these Games, having found himself living accommodation in the Chateauroux city centre, cooking his own meals, no doubt happy to be serving humble pie to everyone who has clashed with him in the past.
At a TV interview after the medal, Manu talked about karma and rued being unable to grab a higher spot on the podium - the difference silver and bronze was 0.1 points - and said, "maybe next time." That next time follows pretty quickly - 10m pistol mixed team (qualification on Monday) and the 25m sport pistol event on August 2. Already, there is no measuring what this medal will have done to Manu's sense of self.
A few weeks ago, Abhinav Bindra, working and in conversations with a bunch of Indian shooters, athletes and table tennis players in the run-up to Paris, said that today's Indian athletes were very different from his generation. But their similarities were felt most intensely at an Olympics. "The biggest mistake athletes make, or we as human beings make, is either we are living in the past or we are thinking about what the future holds. But we forget about the only reality that exists which is the here and now."
After Ramita qualified for the 10m air rifle final she talked about her first experience at the Olympics in the mixed team event on Saturday. Ramita and Arjun Babuta finished ninth, missing out on finals action by a narrow margin. She spoke of understanding the inside of an Olympic contest. "You have to handle pressure. I realised the Olympics are very score-oriented and everyone's chasing outcomes. It's very important to return to your processes and keep repeating your techniques." To be, as Bindra reminds us, in here and the now.
Over the last eight years, the theories about how and why the Indian shooters fell short in Rio and Tokyo were put down to being pampered, going soft and therefore unable to handle pressure when it really counts. Manu, in particular, was demonised, attacked en masse for a meltdown at Tokyo when just a teenager. On Sunday in Paris, she became an Atlas free of the need to even shrug. Every other Indian shooter in Paris knows her story. They would have watched her today and been humbled and awed and seen in her achievement the target to match -- and even surpass -- at these Games.