Mission possible for Filipino ace

BEIJING – Eric Ang won’t be shooting for the moon but, nevertheless, he wants to give it his best shot when he guns for a berth in the six-man finals from 32 elite shooters of the world at the start of clay shooting competitions at the Beijing Shooting Range here today.

A score of 121 of a maximum 125 birds or better will be the goal of the 37-year-old Ang, who is facing the toughest battle of his career since he won the silver medal in the Busan Asian Games of 2002, the gold medal a year later in the Vietnam Southeast Asian Games and the gold in the Southeast Asian Championships this year.

The oldest in the Philippine team, Ang missed the Olympic slot by a mere point in last year’s Kuwait Asian Championships. In the pre-Olympic Shooting Championships in Beijing, he placed 24th among 94 entries and, never giving up on the sport he took up after practical shooting in 1996, went back to his private shooting range in Laoag, setting his target beyond the Beijing Olympics.

He went on to compete in the World Cup in Germany, another qualifying event for the Olympics, but he fell short of the qualifying standard by a mere point.

He finished seventh in the competition but his personal best 121 points were only two points behind the eventual champion.

“It was my first time to shoot that great,” said Ang.

This and his pre-Olympic qualifying performance and his 17th place overall in a Serbian tournament weighed heavily in his choice as a wild card entry granted by the international shooting federation.

To compete for the medal, the ideal score is the perfect score – 125 – established by Italian Giovanni Pelllielo in 1994 and matched during the last 11 years by four world champions.

The Olympic record is 124 set by Michael Diamond of Australia in the 1996 Olympics and matched in Athens 2004 by Alexey Alipov of Russia. Diamond also defeated Ang in Germany last year.

“My goal now is to be mentally and physically prepared because I will be up against the sharp shooters of the world.”

Ang will be with the fourth group that will be firing their guns starting at 9 a.m. for the first three rounds of the eliminations. The next two rounds will be held tomorrow morning and afternoon with the six-man finals set by late afternoon.

In the trap event, shooters stand on designated shooting stations to shoot at clay targets released on or after the shooter’s command. Live pigeons were used as targets in the early years of the sport in the 1900s until they were replaced by the modern flying saucer-shaped targets. They are no longer made of clay (hence the previous name clay shooting) but of pitch and chalk and are colored for better sighting.

The targets are launched from sophisticated automated machines, which are automatically released at the command of the shooter. The Beijing shooting range, designed in the shape of a hunting bow, has an underground bunker, which has 15 trap machines programmed to throw targets at various heights, angles and speeds away from the shooter.

The trap event is considered shotgun’s “long range” contest where trap shooters use double-barreled guns because two shots are permitted at each target.

A round consists of 125 targets (five rounds of 25 targets each) over two days. The players with the best six scores advance to the six-man finals where the scores in the qualification and 25-target final are combined to determine the gold, silver and bronze medal winners.