This 2-year-old girl could give Katniss a run for her arrow-shooting money

Dolly Shivani Cherukuri is our new heroine. And when we say heroine, we’re serious. We’re pretty sure she could save us if an evil villain came along, because she’s an archery champion. Oh and by the way, she hasn’t even turned three yet.

No, that wasn’t a typo: Dolly is only two years old. Today, nine days before her third birthday, Dolly became the youngest Indian EVER to score 388 points over distances of five and seven meters. (We’re not exactly sure how archery scoring works, but we know that her score is serious business and she’s now in the India Book of Records.)

“Shivani scored 199 points in seven-meter distance where the size of the target face was 122 cm. Next, she took up the challenge in five-metre distance where the target face was 88 cm, and she scored 189 points,” Shivani’s coach Laguri Chandrasekhar told The Hindu.

Wow. Talk about amazing. “We wanted her to score 200 points in both distances. But, she registered almost double the score without much sweat,” said Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury of the India Book of Records. “She has all the makings of a top-class archer.” I mean, we’d be impressed if a 2-year-old we knew was able to hit the target!

The amazingly talented toddler has essentially been groomed from birth to be an amazing archer. Her elder brother, an “international archer and coach,” according to The Australian, passed away in a road accident back in 2010. Dolly’s parents had also lost their eldest daughter in 2004. They decided to conceive Dolly through surrogate pregnancy.

“When we came to know that the baby was on her way, we decided to mould her as an archer,” said Dolly’s father, Cherukuri Satyanarayana. He also runs an archery academy, so it seems as though talent runs in the family! “The preparations started when she was in the womb itself,” said Satyanarayana. In fact, Dolly’s parents even had arrows made out of carbon especially for her, to ensure she could carry them at such a young age. We sure hope Dolly likes archery as much as her parents do!

Want to see her in action? While we’re sure this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Dolly, in the meantime, you can watch this video of Dolly shooting arrows that her parents posted back in January. We are totally blown away.

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