Shooting: Shooters relieved to break their duck

Juliet Etherington and Kathryn Mead were a mixture of relief and disappointment after winning the first Commonwealth Games shooting medal for New Zealand yesterday.

The Auckland 50m prone rifle pair picked up bronze but admit it could have been better.

They tied for second with England but missed silver on a countback while Scottish winners Susan Jackson and Sheena Sharp were just five points better.

Etherington, who won bronze in the individual event at Manchester four years ago, said her first reaction was pleasure that the New Zealand shooting team had broken their medal duck midway through the second day's competition.

Government sports funding agency Sparc has predicted 12 shooting medals at these Games, something which had played on the minds of many in the team.

"Expectations are fairly high, as everyone's aware. If you get a medal, it's a medal and it's one of the 12 we're meant to get," Etherington said.

But if ever the pressure of the sport of shooting was illustrated, it was when Wang Yang stepped up in the men's air pistol pairs.

Yang is the Chinese whose nationality papers scraped through not long before the New Zealand team left for Melbourne. His world-class shooting when he was close to breaking into the elite of China's shooting team marked him as a real Games prospect.

His partnership with 10-times Commonwealth medallist Greg Yelavich in the air pistol pairs was regarded as a real medal chance.

And Yang still was as he stepped up on the 10m range. Yelavich had shot well and was tied second in the first relay. Wang is a deliberate shooter anyway and he was getting 'into the zone' to shoot perfect 10s. However, he became entangled in his intense desire and caught in a web of cancelling.

Shooters wait for all the various and intricate mental and physical details to be aligned before they pull the trigger. If they feel the shot is not right, they will lower their arm and gun - called cancelling. Yang cancelled so many times in waiting for the perfect shot that he ran out of time in the 1hr 45m event, in which time he must complete 60 shots.

A crestfallen Yang said: "I was trying so hard. I really wanted to shoot 10s but I wasted a lot of time and in the end I was trying to catch up."

His final rounds of 92 and 93 saw the Kiwis in seventh place overall behind gold medallists India - who have now won four out of six shooting events entered - and England and Australia with silver and bronze.

In other events, the father-and-son pair of Grant and Ryan Taylor finished a close sixth in the prone rifle event in which they were hoping to medal.

-HERALD ON SUNDAY