HANGZHOU – Welcome to the finicky Games. Nothing is measured in medals here, only in blinks of an eye and the width of a human hair. These Games have advanced measuring systems because there is no other way to separate competitive humans. As Singapore shooter Martina Veloso says on Wednesday, if you pull your rifle trigger during an inhale rather than midway through an exhale, it could be a 9, not a 10.
And 9s don’t win you medals.
In the 200m individual medley some days ago, China swimmer Ye Shiwen won silver from Kim Seo-yeong of South Korea by 0.02 of a second. This is the fun of sport and also it’s ungodly fury. A tighter turn? A longer fingernail? A millisecond-better start? You can rewrite novels, but never races.
A New Zealand rower famously vomited before his final at the London Olympics and anxiety was the cause. His Games, and these Games, are where the tension lies in millimetres and fractions. Here in Hangzhou, Japan beat China in the men’s cycling team sprint by 0.034 of a second. In the lightweight women’s double sculls, across 2,000m, Iran lost bronze to Indonesia by 0.26sec.
How do people even breathe? How does the fear of error not drive them batty?
Shooter Teo Shun Xie is dressed as she always is on Wednesday. Wearing a fine coat of honesty. In a field of suffocating talent, she’s admirably just reached her first Asian Games final in the 25m pistol, yet she won’t flinch from the truth.
In the final, she was seventh and she says: “I was slow to adapt to the lighting and alignment (in the final hall).” The hall did seem poorly laid out, but did she let it play with her mind? “Yes.”
At these Games, this wise shooter knows, the little things matter because the margins are so fine. At the shooting range on Wednesday, where gunfire seemed incongruous among the lush hills, the pressure of a mistake hung in every lane. Teh Xiu Hong, who danced ballet for years, knows the value of precision and balance. And yet, at the end of the 25m pistol qualification, she missed the final by two points because of tiny errors.
On Tuesday, in the first series of the qualification, she had a 93/100. “A lot of close 9s,” she says. It means her shots were millimetres away from a 10. It means minute errors you have to somehow shrug off. It means that even though she rebounded with series of 96, 98, 99, 98, 97, she missed the final.
Does it pinch?
“Yes, it does. Of course.”
The act of brilliant skill stays in the memory, but sport is mostly decided by consistency. The least mistakes win. Some sports – say football, which also punishes errors – give the illusion that they are coloured by imagination and invention, but so many others require humans to turn into machinery.
Just repeat, repeat, repeat. Just silence voices in the head. Just pull triggers, fly off the blocks, smash shuttles, like you’ve done a hundred thousand times in practice. It is this conflict in the brain which is being played out all over Hangzhou. As Singapore coach Kirill Ivanov, standing behind the 50m three positions (3P) shooters, drawls: “It looks technical, but it’s psychological.”
Try harder, we tell athletes, but it’s never that simple. “When I try harder,” said Jasmine Ser, who came 21st in the women’s 50m 3P, “I overtry. But you don’t want to overtry. Just do what you normally do.” And yet keeping it simple and normal in a major Games is complex. On the outside, shooters are studies in stillness, yet inside they’re doing ju-jitsu with their demons of struggle. “One 9 is OK,” says Veloso, 16th in the women’s 50m 3P, “two 9s mess with the head.”
Mistakes have a serious weight, yet most of the Singapore shooters say the same thing. “Let it go.” Teo says it’s always the same ammunition, same target, same weapon, it’s about accepting nerves and adhering to a process. “It’s a leap of faith,” she says. She took one and got to a final.
The only defence athletes have is to tune themselves for any eventuality. Veloso says some Indian shooters have trainers and do tennis ball drills before an event to sharpen the brain. Singapore’s Adele Tan, 25th in the 50m 3P which she is somewhat new to, trained for the possible wind in her event with her coach putting on a fan behind her.
All this might only make her a millimetre more precise, but they know its value. After all, in the 10m air rifle, the 10th ring – what we erroneously refer to as the bull’s eye – is 0.5mm. Like the dot a pen makes on a paper. It requires a watchmaker’s precision and yet, one day after she arrived in Hangzhou, Veloso was down with body aches, fever and a sore throat.
This wasn’t a mistake. Just the unkindest kiss of fate.
