After a forty-year wait, a Trap Shooter returns to the Olympic Games
In 1984, Leonel Martínez of Venezuela competed in the trap shooting event at the Los Angeles Olympics. He finished in a tie for 41st place.
But he was only twenty years old at the time. No doubt many more opportunities would follow.
Martinez indeed qualified for the Olympic Games again – but only last Friday. After a waiting period of 40 yearshe will finally return to the Summer Games, next year in Paris.
Martínez, now 60, qualified by finishing second in the men’s trap shooting at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile.
“This is how I see things: age is just a number,” Martínez said in an interview in Spanish.
Now he is focusing on training for Paris, where he will compete against many twenty-somethings.
Martínez has been chasing an Olympic medal since he was a teenager. He learned trap shooting, in which competitors shoot clay targets in a split second, through his father, Alonso Martínez, who competed in the sport internationally. He first tried trap shooting when he was 17 years old, when his father let him borrow one of the guns.
“Almost immediately I loved it,” he said.
When Martínez arrives in Paris next summer, it will be the culmination of a 40-year journey that has often involved sacrifice, he said. There were days away from his family, countless hours of training and flickers of self-doubt, especially as his time away from Los Angeles grew longer each year.
Martínez said he still remembered how bewildered he felt in Los Angeles at age 19, and how “everything looked so big” at the time. Before his first match, he was apprehensive as he put on clothes in the yellow, blue and red colors of his home country.
“That feeling doesn’t help you much in getting results,” Martínez said.
Martínez left those Games without a medal, but said he planned to be back at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.
However, when he returned to Venezuela, he quickly became preoccupied with ordinary life.
He started a company that manufactured disposable items for medical professionals, such as scrubs and other tools. He met the woman who is now his wife, Magaly Chacin, and had two children. By the time the 1988 Games arrived, he had retired from professional competition and decided instead to focus all his energy on his family and business.
But after about 25 years, Martínez said, he saw that he had reached a stable place in life. His children were grown and business was stable, allowing him to take stock of his old dream.
“Once I realized that my family was good and everyone was taken care of, I thought, ‘Now I can take my mind off things,’” Martinez said.
In 2011, he began training to return to kick shooting with the goal of returning to the world stage, and was struck by how effortlessly the rhythms of the sport came back to him, he said. Gripping the weapon tightly and steadily tracking targets felt Naturally.
“Trap shooting, unlike other sports such as football, swimming or tennis, is more of a mental sport than a physical one,” says Martínez. “It is a sport that is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical.”
After retiring, Martínez competed in several Pan American Games, including Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2011; Toronto, in 2015; and Lima, Peru, in 2019. In Guadalajara, he said, he initially worried about whether he could compete with younger athletes. But by the time he reached Lima, his confidence was back and he felt better during the matches than ever before.
Age and maturity have been advantages in trap shooting, according to Martínez.
“My emotions are different, and now I know I can control my thoughts and feelings,” Martínez said. “That’s why I say I’m better now than I was in Los Angeles.”
But when he fired the shot that won him the silver medal in Santiago last Friday, his emotions overwhelmed him, he said.
Martínez’s Olympic drought is not the longest ever. Hiroshi Hoketsu from Japan, a rider, Had it for 44 years gap between participation in the 1964 and 2008 Games. He competed again in London in 2012, aged 71, and finished 40th out of 50 in dressage.
Martínez said he did not view the Paris Olympics as an opportunity to reflect on his achievements, but instead as a business trip to win a medal.
And he said he had already set a goal for after Paris.
“I started my career in Los Angeles in 1984,” he said. “Well, I’m going to the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028 – and returning to where I started.”