Olympic athlete by day, guitarist by night. The man who takes to the stage to give a concert with Los Geiperman, a group that plays Hombres G covers, is an Olympic gold medalist in the Tokyo Games in clay pigeon shooting. The man who practices with the shotgun and clay pigeon in the pit to try to repeat the success in these Paris Games is a music enthusiast who rehearses with the quartet and some weekends plays the chords in front of the public. His name is Alberto Fernández. By day, the Olympic shooter. By night, a geiperman.
It is curious that two such different worlds coexist in the same person. Clay pigeon shooting is a sport that requires the precision of a surgeon and a mind of steel. A millimetre or a thousandth separates success from failure. But all that coldness goes out the window when Alberto Fernández dresses up as a guitarist and plays the strings.
Shooting was a family tradition. “I started with my father when I was eight years old. I was a child who only wanted to enjoy myself, I didn’t think about competing. Until they called me up to the national team, I discovered competition and ended up at the Games,” recalls Fernández, a 41-year-old from Madrid. He made his debut in Beijing 2008 and Paris will be his fifth consecutive Olympic event. After being world champion three times, heaven touched him in Tokyo with that gold medal in mixed trap alongside Fátima Gálvez, a modality that has now disappeared and which leads him to the individual tournament.
The exercise is carefully measured. The target weighs between 100 and 110 grams, is 12 centimeters in diameter and two centimeters thick. It is shot 15 meters away, at a speed of between 101 and 107 km/h (“it’s like seeing an aspirin at a meter”). And every thousandth of a second it moves 36 centimeters. The shooter has about 0.5 seconds to shoot and hit with a 24 gram lead cartridge that comes out of a shotgun weighing about four kilos. This goes on and on without stopping. Only an almost automatic, mechanical movement, repeated so many times without thinking, allows for dozens of hits.
“It is a sport with many ingredients. The most important is the head, you have to control everything with your mind, the position of the body, the attention when you are going to order the dish, managing a zero, a mistake… that is what I work on the most,” says Alberto, who has lived through the great evolution of a sport that in Beijing, when it debuted at the Games, was considered “weekend” and not professional. After the Rio event he hired a mental trainer, Diego Gutiérrez, with whom he wrote a book after the gold in Tokyo: Olympic spirit. Don’t let a defeat defeat you, nor let a conquest conquer you. “In this sport, if you make a mistake, the plate wins, the movement has to be very precise. You can’t think, a distraction kills you. The one who makes the fewest mistakes wins. You acquire the technique over time, but the mental part is the most difficult. It happens to all athletes that in competition we have positive and negative thoughts, both of which you have to know how to manage. You have to know what to say to yourself without depending on anyone.”
Before shooting, Alberto Fernández worked as a driver with a van delivering goods around Madrid and the villages. Today, with his wife, Bea, also a shooter, he runs a company dedicated to his sport, which sells products and has a school. The man has a long way to go. Next Monday he will begin competing in Paris after being European champion this year and a more difficult last year. First he suffered from bruxism, he clenched his jaw a lot and that caused him migraines, until they put a splint on him; and one summer he suffered a kidney stone, he was hospitalized for a week, lost four kilos (it greatly influences body control when shooting) and it took him a month to get back in shape. Now he is in Paris without that gold in Tokyo having changed his life “at all”: “Fátima and I thought we would have more repercussions but it has been the opposite, nothing, and as for sponsors, a disaster,” he laments.
Alberto, despite everything, is thinking about the next Games, Los Angeles 2028, while studying a master’s degree in sports journalism at UCAM. And of course, while he gives concerts with Los Geiperman, and there are already about 200 in 10 years. “Music relaxes me, it entertains me, it’s my passion. It helps me disconnect from shooting. I’m always listening to or thinking about music, about how to make some chords, a solo…”. With Álvaro Hervás as singer, Alberto Moliner on drums and Sergio Ayala on guitar, they have given concerts for up to 8,000 people, such as at the Solares festivals in Cantabria. Los Hombres G cheer them on, and even some of their members have played with them from time to time: “We have a great vibe.”
His musical production has not stopped even before the Games, although while he is competing in Paris they are looking for a replacement for him. At the Games, Alberto has to concentrate again on the clay pigeon, the shot. Olympian by day and guitarist by night.
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