He’s won medals in two other events, and there was even an benefit to his blunders: he met his wife, a fellow-shooter, when she came over to console him at a bar after his 2004 flub. During competition, when the tension got tightest, he took hits from a flask of whiskey.Įmmons’s Olympic record isn’t defined entirely by failure. Sumner Paine had a more specific strategy. Find something humorous about it and refer to the situation that way. Extract all the wisdom from the situation and then never bring it up again.Did you fail or was it a “learning situation”? Top that off with the fear of leaving a legacy as ‘The guy who failed three times when he had the medal within an inch of his hand,’ and you have some real pressure to contend with.” Cole says that after his experiences at the Olympics, Emmons might suffer from what he calls “failure syndrome,” a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder for athletes. “Every time he gives a press conference the media bring it up again, and at some level he relives the agony. What is it like to give in to nerves at a crucial moment? Is there any way to prevent it? “I’ve seen him called Wrong-Way Emmons or Cross-Fire Matt,” says Bill Cole, a sports psychologist who has worked with a number of Olympic athletes. Missing by “just a little” is all it takes. Shooting declined an interview request from The New Yorker on Emmons’s behalf, saying he was in full prep mode for the Olympics.) Just a little.” (A representative from U.S.A. “And as I’m doing this, I put my finger on my trigger. ‘We got this, we trained for this,’ ” Emmons told the BBC, trying to explain his lapse. “I did my pre-shot routine and I remember-as I’m looking through my sights, settling from twelve o’clock down into the bull’s-eye-I got this calm feeling. (This year’s modern pentathlon, which combines running, horseback riding, swimming, fencing, and shooting, will feature laser guns rather than air guns.) As such, the expectations for an élite athletes’ precision have only increased. In the intervening century, competitive gun technology has only gotten more sophisticated. Had he wanted to, the police figured, Paine could have nicked off the man’s fingernails one by one then put a bullet through his heart. Paine was arrested for assault but quickly released. Five years later, arriving home to find his wife in a state of undress with his daughter’s music teacher, Paine pulled out his gun and fired four shots at the fleeing teacher. In the first Olympiad, in 1896, the American Sumner Paine used a Colt revolver to win one gold and one silver in the pistol competition. It’s a sport whose top competitors are expected to be so accurate that we have a hard time believing that they could actually miss. Rifle shooters are trained to fire between heartbeats. (Archery demands at least one muscular arm.) Yet there is no sport that requires more mental precision. Running down the list of twenty-six sports in London, none requires less athleticism, as we typically define it, than the shooting events. Emmons called the shot a “freak of nature.” He finished fourth. This time, his finger slipped and he fired early, scoring a 4.4. Each time Emmons shoots, he aims above the target, lets his sight fall into the bull’s-eye, then pulls the trigger. Four years later, in Beijing, Emmons again had a large lead on the final shot: he needed a score of 6.7 in a sport where anything below 8.0 is amateurish. Instead, he shot at the wrong target, one lane over, and got no score at all. Going into his final shot, Emmons was in first place and needed only a mediocre score for gold. At the 2004 Games, Emmons competed in the three-position event, in which participants shoot from their stomachs, knees, and feet at a target fifty metres away. The London Olympics will feature ten thousand five hundred athletes, give or take a few rhythmic gymnasts, but it’s possible that none are more compelling than American air-rifle shooter Matt Emmons. Reeves Wiedeman on dealing with Olympic failure, and on athletes and protest.
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