This year marks 30 years since I began working in clay shooting. It’s an important milestone that spans most of my professional life, and I’ve been able to reach it thanks to the trust of the organizations and athletes I’ve worked with, the curiosity I’ve shown towards these sports, and the perseverance and desire for improvement that have always guided me.
I was 39 years old when I was introduced by the federal doctor, Francesco Fazi, to President Luciano Rossi and the technical commissioners of the three disciplines (trap, skeet, and double trap). They decided to include me as a psychologist within the national teams. I must admit that I knew nothing about this sport, especially its psychological implications and the emotional states of the shooters during competitions. Certainly, it was easy to say that mistakes were caused by competitive stress, but how could I be of help to athletes who lost a competition by just one target, perhaps hitting 121 out of 125 when making it to the finals required hitting just one more? So how could we improve performance by that little bit (one more target), which made all the difference between a win and a loss?
That was the task I was given, and watching the first competitions, it wasn’t at all clear what the approach should be on each shooting station when a target was hit compared to when it was missed. The coaches helped me understand how the sport worked, and the shooters themselves began to share with me how they experienced the competitions, their thoughts and emotions, their internal dialogue at various moments before and during the competition, during breaks between rounds, and before making a mistake. I spent a lot of time with them, right up to the 2000 Olympics in Australia, attending the European Championships, World Championships, and training camps every year. Meanwhile, in 1998, I also started working with the shooters of the Fiamme Oro, coached by Pierluigi Pescosolido, with whom I worked weekly until the London Olympics in 2012.
The work I did with the Italian shooters, among the best in the world, gave me the opportunity to start working at the international level. This opportunity was provided by Marcello Dradi, who contacted me to provide consultancy to Indian and Iranian shooters, for whom he was the coach. It was a collaboration that opened me up to different worlds and mentalities, and it continued with Dradi as a consultant for the Chinese national trap team until the beginning of COVID, when it obviously came to an end. In those same years, I also prepared James Galea, an established Maltese doctor, who was motivated to become a professional shooter. We worked together intensively for several years, and thanks to him, I was offered a psychological consultancy for the Maltese national team in the year leading up to the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
In recent years, my involvement with the world of clay shooting has decreased, but this year I spent a week in Taiwan conducting a theoretical and practical course on psychological training in clay shooting and target shooting. In the practical part, I worked with their national athletes, and one of them, shooter Lee Meng Yuan, won the bronze medal in skeet at his Olympic debut. I hope I was helpful to him, even if just by 0.1 percent.
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