Shooting consistently, the 29-year old shooter beat the home champion Viganò and the expert French finalist Clamens. With 144 hits, he gained his first Gold medal of the year, with 2 hits of advantage on his followers.
The 29-year old Turkish shooter Oguzhan Tuzun, the champion of the 2010 ISSF World Cup Final in Izmir, won today’s Trap Men Final at the ISSF Shotgun World Cup in Lonato, the last world-class competition before the Olympic Games.
After two great competition days with perfect weather conditions, Tuzun qualified for today’s final in the lead with 121 hits out of 125 targets. The Turkish shooter competed neck and neck with Italy’s Viganò and France’s Clamens, finishing then in first with a total score of 144 hits (121+23), in spite of a malfunction that forced him to change his shotgun during the match.
The fight for the Silver medal between the home shooter Viganò and the three-time French Olympian lasted right to the last shot, and further on. Stephane Clamens advanced to the final match with 121 qualification hits. Then, hitting 21 targets in the final, he closed the round with a total score of 142 hits. At the same time, shooting on his home turf, Italy’s Rodolfo Viganò gained a spot in the final match with 119 qualification targets, and then shattered 23 clays in the final match, finishing with a total score of 142 hits as well.
The two contenders met then in a shoot-off to decide the Silver and the Bronze medal. There, the home court advantage played a determinant role, as Viganò secured the Silver with 3 hits, leaving Clames the Bronze with 2 hits, and turning on the crowd of supporters following him at the range.
The 2004 Olympic Champ and 2008 Olympic Bronze medallist, Alexey Alipov of Russia, keeps on shooting at great levels. Qualified with 120 targets, he started off today’s final shooting consistently. But after a break needed to restore the electronic scoreboard, he missed his fifth and sixth targets. Missing again later on during the final, he landed in fourth place with a total score of 141 (120+21), just one target far from the medals. The Russian shooter had won Silver at the last ISSF World Cup Stage in London, and Bronze at this year’s first Stage in Tucson.
Passing through a qualification shoot-off, San Marino’s Stefano Selva, 42, found his way to the final with a score of 118 hits. The expert shooter had participated in his last world cup final match 22 years ago, in Bologna, in 1990, at the age of 20 years. Hitting 21 targets in the final, Selva closed the match in fifth with a total of 139 targets. Following him, today’s surprise has been Ahmed Kamar, a 25-year old Egyptian shooter competing for the first time in a world cup medal match. Kamar, who had finished in 90th place just ten days ago at the pre-Olympic world cup in London, scored 119 targets to make it into today’s final, finishing then in sixth with 139 hits as well.
The ISSF Shotgun World Cup in Lonato continues tomorrow with a day of official trainings for the next events.
The next medal matches will take place on Sunday the 6th, when the Double Trap Men and Skeet Women events are scheduled to take place starting from 5 PM (GMT+1).
Follow the matches on www.issf-sports.org and www.youtube.com/issfchannel