Three years ago, Lin Yi-chun (林怡君) would have never have imagined that by the year 2000 she would be competing in the Sydney Olympics as a double trap shotgun shooter.
Then, she was just an average Taiwanese high school student. She liked athletics, competed on her junior high basketball team and had studied ballet when she was younger. Now she is Taiwan's lone representative in a sport that receives very little attention. But the fact is that Lin has a very good chance of bringing home a medal.
"It all happened by chance," Lin told the Taipei Times just days before her competition, relaxed and wearing Taiwan's team tracksuit.
The road to the Sydney 2000 Olympics for Lin, now 19, began in her second year in high school, when her mother had a chance meeting with an old friend, her current coach, Tseng Chao-hsiung (
Her mother had taken her to the shooting range where Tseng shot. Lin was intrigued by the sport.
"It was exciting [to shoot]," she said. "I was curious too because I had never tried that kind of thing before."
After a summer of more serious training, Lin started taking the sport more seriously. For the past year-and-a-half, since she started studying at
Getting to the Olympics hasn't been easy though, her coach said.
"While Lin has some natural ability, it has taken her a lot of time and hard work," Tseng said.
Lin, who some have labeled as being tough because of her occasional blunt directness, has a good balance of both intensity and cheerfulness, not to mention a cute smile and dimples that her friends say remind them of that popular Asian feline "Hello Kitty."
But while she may be cute, she's got a short fuse as well, she admits. When she started trying her hand at the sport, teasing from her peers at high school sometimes made her lose her cool.
"When I couldn't take it any more and got angry with them I would tell them, `if you say anything else I'll go and get my gun.'"
"That shut them up," she said chuckling.
Training with other athletes her age at Linkou's National College of Physical Educational (國家體育學院) was also a challenge, she said. An only child who grew up alone with her mother, the experience of being around people where she wasn't in control was tough at first, she said.
"Shooting has taught me patience and how to control my temper," Lin said. "When I first started training, all of the other girls were older than me but at home I was the oldest [used to getting my way all the time]. A lot of the time the students were the same age as me but I had to listen to them. In the end there were a few times where we almost got into a fight."
But gradually, she learned how to set goals and one by one move herself up the rungs.
"For a long time losing was a big deal for me. In the beginning, when I started going to tournaments, I was always last. But gradually I started taking on one opponent after another and used them as a goal to push myself to do better," she said.
In January, competing at the Asian Games, she won the bronze against seasoned competitors like China's Zhang Yafei (
With that victory she was qualified to compete in the Olympics for Taiwan and became the youngest competitor in her event.
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