Experts talk about the hardness of the shot, how the difficulty of maintaining concentration and regulating pulse and breathing increases as a competition progresses with a cruel format: the one that trembles, out into the street. And so, Fátima Gálvez and Mar Molné, two pulses, two lives, and one shotgun. Solid, impassive statues until the penultimate minute, serious, concentrated, not one extra movement, not one blink, the wooden butt of their shotguns in perfect symbiosis with their cheeks and their gaze, protected from external influences by blinkers, when the decisive moment arrives, Molné, the infallible shooter of the day before and the morning, and Gálvez, the champion of Tokyo, melt standing, wax in the sun, on the scorched meadow of Châteauroux, south of Paris, where they finish fourth and fifth respectively in the Olympic Trench competition.
The victory goes to the extraordinary and surprising Adriana Ruano, who won the first gold medal in the Olympic history of Guatemala, and only the third in total, after the bronze of Jean Pierre Brol in the men’s trap the day before, precisely, and the silver of the walker Erick Barrondo in the 20 kilometers of London 2012. To achieve this, Ruano, a high-level artistic gymnast until she broke her back, at the age of 15, broke the Olympic record of the final, destroying 45 of the 50 plates she shot at, and leaving the second Italian left-hander Silvana Marina Stanco five plates behind. When they both shot in the final five-plate salvo, the two Spaniards were no longer there. Nor was the bronze medalist, the Australian left-hander Penny Smith, the last to be eliminated in the very tough format of the final. In the trap sieve there is neither compassion nor the right to correct an error when faced with flying targets, as big as an aspirin pill seen from a meter away, that emerge randomly from three clay pigeon launchers, and an unknown trajectory to check if, in fact, the eye can be faster than the bullet.
For the first time, two Spanish women competed in a six-person Olympic final, a majority together with a Guatemalan, an Italian, a Chinese and an Australian. It was necessary to imagine the best outcome. The excitement aroused by the Spanish women, the two best in the previous phases (123 out of 125 targets had been hit by the debutant 22-year-old Molné from Tarragona, and 122 by the Andalusian Gálvez, 37 years old), turns into disappointment in a final that leaves Spain without a nap. After a tragic start – she missed four of her first five shots – Gálvez narrowly escaped being the first of the six finalists eliminated after the first 25 targets. “That’s when you saw the importance of the choice of glass. The day was cloudy and I put on clear lenses, but then the sun came out strongly and the plate was shining very brightly and I couldn’t locate it. It was hard for me to relax my eyes.” Analytical, she shot blindly into an orange gloom, a 12-centimeter-diameter disc that shoots out at 15 meters, at more than 100 meters per hour. Zero emotions with the shotgun on her shoulder. She aims with both eyes open and almost always hits the target. Not always. “Mentally, with pressure and heat, it has been difficult to overcome that.”
The left-handed Molné, who lasted one more round, with 160 shots in two days, has gone from nowhere to being part of the national joy. She has gone from being the queen of the clay pigeon shooting competitions at the village festivals in her land – “and she filled the pantry with the hams and cheeses she won,” she reveals – to being surrounded by the best precision shooters in the world, and she knew how to transform herself into a relentless sniper, like the girl whose father let her shoot one time when she was accompanying him on a hunting trip and, boom, on the first try she hit the tree she was aiming at. She begins to weaken perhaps when she realises that the prize for which she is shooting is much more important than a ham even from Jabugo. The closer she gets to the medal, the closer she is to the end of the series, the more she trembles. When she stops being the girl she wants to be, she fails. The experience that transforms a game into life. “It’s true that I was a bit nervous, but life is meant to be enjoyed and I enjoyed every shot, every target and the final like a child,” said the athlete from El Morell, who has been travelling since she was 14 with a shotgun and cartridge belts full of 214-gram cartridges and 300 lead pellets, her toys, in Carrusel Deportivo. “My psychologist and I said that it was a bit premature to think about Paris, but we were prepared for Los Angeles. When I won the place for the 24th, I couldn’t believe it, and even less so when I got fourth place in the Games and set a personal record in the qualifiers.”
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