Tue, Sep 19, 2000 page15

• Lin Yi-chun aiming to shoot for gold for Taiwan

  DOUBLE TRAP SHOTGUN A chance meeting three years ago lead the spirited youngster to the shooting range. A bronze medal in the last Asian Games showed the world that a new talent had arrived on the scene

  • By William Ide / STAFF REPORTER IN SYDNEY
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  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.

  

  Lin Yi-chin, Taiwan's hopeful in the double trap shotgun event.

  PHOTO: LIN CHENG-KUNG, TAIPEI TIMES

  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 (曾兆雄).

  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 Chingwen Technological Institute (景文技術學院), she has eaten, slept and breathed shooting, preparing for her debut this year at the Olympics.

  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 (張亞菲) 30, and Japan's Yukie Nakayama, 21.

  With that victory she was qualified to compete in the Olympics for Taiwan and became the youngest competitor in her event.

  With a Hello Kitty sticker on her shotgun and another patch on her vest Lin said she is not worried about the age gap between herself and her competitors, or their differing levels of experience.

  "A lot of them are older than me. But when it comes to competition it's more a matter of skill than how old an athlete is," she said.

  Her coach said that in the double trap, there are really no superior athletes, everyone is about even.

  In other words, today as Lin and others zero in on 120 small orange discs flying at unpredictable angles and speeds, it will be the best woman who will win.

  Anything is possible though. "In 1996, Kimberly Rhode won the double trap and at the time she was the youngest competitor at 17," Lin said. Rhode, now 21, has been competing since she was 10.

  In April this year the young shooter had a chance to train in Australia with her sport idol Michael Diamond. Diamond has already won two consecutive shooting gold medals at the Olympics this year.

  After her training stint abroad, Lin shot a perfect 150 at the Taiwan Plum Flower Cup in June, setting a new -- albeit unofficial -- world record. Her record was the equivalent of a 113 in today's competition. In a competition in Sydney earlier this year, Zhang shot a 142 out of 150 targets, while Nakayama shot 144.

  Whether Lin's performance in June was an omen remains to be seen as the competition will be a close one, with Zhang, Rhode and Nakayama all competing today, her coach said.

  Tseng said that Lin really has so much to gain and so little to lose.

  "She can compete in the Olympics until she's 40," Tseng said.

  Longevity aside, Lin has set her sights high for Sydney. Following months of nothing but eight hours of practice a day or as she puts it "shooting, eating, playing with my dog and sleep," there is only one goal she has in mind, "a gold medal of course."
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