SANTIAGO – In 1984, Leonel Martinez of Venezuela competed in the trap shooting event at the Los Angeles Olympics. He finished tied for 41st, but he was only 20 years old then. Surely, there would be many more chances to come.

Martinez indeed qualified for the quadrennial event again – but not until last Friday. After a 40-year wait, he will finally return to the Games – at Paris 2024.

Martinez, now 60, qualified by finishing second in men’s trap shooting at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile.

“This is how I see things: Age is just a number,” he said in an interview in Spanish.

Now, he is focused on training for Paris, where he will be competing against many athletes in their 20s.

Martinez has been chasing an Olympic medal since his teenage years. He learnt trap shooting, in which competitors shoot at clay targets in split-second times, through his father, Alonso, who competed internationally in the sport.

He first tried trap shooting at 17, when his father let him borrow one of the guns.

“Almost immediately, I loved it,” he said.

When Martinez arrives in Paris next summer, it will be the culmination of a four-decade journey that has often come with sacrifice, he said.

There were days away from his family, countless hours of training and flickers of self-doubt, especially as his time since Los Angeles increased with each passing year.

Martinez said he still remembered how bewildered he felt in the United States, and how “everything looked so large” at the time. Before his first competition, as he put on clothes shaded in the yellow, blue and red of his home country, he was anxious.

“That feeling doesn’t help you much with results,” he said.

Martinez left those Games without a medal, but said he had planned to be back by the 1988 Olympics. When he returned home, however, he quickly became preoccupied with regular life.

By the time the Seoul Games arrived, he retired from professional competition to focus all of his energy on his family and business.

But in 2011, he started training to compete in trap shooting again with the goal of returning to the world stage.

He was struck by how effortlessly the rhythms of the sport came back to him, he said. Firmly grasping the gun and steadily tracking targets felt natural.

“Trap shooting, unlike other sports like football or swimming or tennis, is a sport more mental than physical. It’s a sport that is 90 per cent mental, 10 per cent physical,” Martinez said.

After coming out of retirement, Martinez competed in several Pan American Games, including in 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 made it to Lima, his confidence was back, and he felt better while competing than ever before.

Age and maturity have been benefits in trap shooting, he added.

“My emotions are different, and now I know that I can control my thoughts and feelings. That’s why I say I’m better now than I was in Los Angeles,” he said.

Last Friday, though, when he fired the shot that won him the silver medal in Santiago, his emotions overwhelmed him.

Martinez’s Olympic drought is not the longest on record. Hiroshi Hoketsu of Japan, an equestrian, had a 44-year gap between competing in the 1964 and 2008 Games. He competed again in London in 2012, at age 71, and finished 40th out of 50 in dressage.

Martinez said he was not treating the Paris Olympics as an opportunity to ruminate about his accomplishments, but instead as a work trip to win a medal.

And he said he had already set a goal for after Paris.

“I started my career in Los Angeles 1984. Well, I’m going to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028 – and return to the place where I started,” he said. NYTIMES