| Alexey Alipov won gold for Russia - the first and 500th Yesterday at the Olympic Games in Athens, the first gold medal for the Russian team in the trap exercise was won by 29-year-old trap shooting master Alexey Alipov. His victory brought Russia the five hundredth Olympic award of the highest dignity for the entire period of the country's participation in the Olympics - since 1908.
Shooters are the center of attention of Russian fans, as a rule, only during the largest sports forum of the four-year anniversary. Few people named Alipov, who finished ninth in Sydney four years ago, among the favorites for the Athens starts. And he began to ruin the forecasts even during qualifying, when he methodically smashed coal-pitch plates with rifle shots. Alexey showed an excellent, almost absolute result - in the end he knocked out 149 flying targets out of 150 possible, setting two new Olympic records at once - both in qualifying (124 out of 125) and taking into account the final shooting.
Before Alipov’s victory, things were not going well for our Olympians in the capital of Greece. We were waiting for the first “gold” on Saturday, but our Lyubov Galkina and Mikhail Nestruev misfired in the bullet shooting at the decisive moment. Although, of course, they deserve the kindest words for their “silver”. But the representatives of China showed nerves of iron, and athletes from the most populated country in the world immediately took the lead in the team event. On Saturday evening, the Chinese consolidated their success by taking two more first places in the diving competition. But the head of the Chinese sports delegation, before leaving for Athens, said that the athletes of this country plan to win no more than 20 gold medals - eight medals of the highest standard less than in Sydney. However, the President of the National Olympic Committee of Russia Leonid Tyagachev assumed in advance that in the first days of the Olympics Russia would not be among the leaders in the medal standings. We must deliver the main blow to our main competitors when competitions in athletics, as well as freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling begin.
Olga Slyusareva won the second medal yesterday and the sixth for Russia in Athens in the evening in the group road race. She will still have the opportunity to add to her personal collection of awards. Olga, like our famous track and field athlete Tatyana Lebedeva, is an all-rounder and competes in two disciplines at once - road cycling and track cycling. If we talk about relative failures, then last weekend the athletes of the “presidential” sport - judokas - did not please us with anything. The fencers were also disappointed, as they were also left without awards. Ilya TRISVIATSKY |
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