TIME: Flawless Diamond
[Following an Australian Olympian]
Monday, September 18, 2000
By TIM BLAIR and MICHAEL WARE
For Michael Diamond, less practice makes perfect.
Australia's laser-eyed trap shooter becomes bored and
loses focus if he overtrains, so usually restricts
his stints at the range to two a month — far fewer
than most of his Olympic opponents, who tend to train
like, well, Olympians. They blast away at flying clay
discs for days on end. Diamond goes to the beach.
But Diamond boosted his training before the Games,
practicing twice a week, dutifully working through
100 rounds each time. Diamond didn't work nearly so
hard before taking gold in Atlanta, and deliberately
didn't shoot at all for three months before the World
Cup in March. "I upped the tempo because I knew these
were going to be hard targets," said Diamond on Sept.
17, after claiming his second Olympic gold medal.
It was a far-sighted call. The 28-year-old Diamond
finished with an overall score of 147 targets hit out
of 150 launched. It was two fewer than his winning
total in 1996, but Cecil Park in 2000 was
immeasurably more difficult. "It's a bitch of a
range," complained Canadian shooter George Leary. The
main problem: 11-cm orange discs become nearly
invisible when fired at 100 km/h past a background of
brown grass. Diamond said he'd never experienced
tougher conditions. Yet he missed only three of
Saturday's 75 targets, and none of Sunday's. Fellow
Australian Russell Mark never recovered from a
troubled Saturday and failed to make the medal round,
leaving Italy's Giovanni Pellielo and Briton Ian Peel
to battle Diamond.
Peel is a minor Diamond nemesis, having exposed
hitherto unknown anxiety in the Australian during the
World Cup, also held at the Olympic venue. Peel won
after Diamond missed four of the final 11 targets,
nervous at performing for the first time before a big
hometown audience. "I thought I was going to have a
heart attack," Diamond said at the time. "I was green
to the pressure."
Green no longer, he played the Olympic crowd
expertly, at one point holding a finger to his lips
to silence screams of delight so other competitors
could concentrate. To Diamond's fans, the car-radio
salesman is the most charismatic wielder of firearms
since Dirty Harry. Says the racing driver Peter
Brock: "You have to appreciate someone who can
operate under these kinds of pressures."
Diamond shot better and faster as he closed in on his
goal of becoming the second man to win back-to-back
Olympic trap titles, and later revealed that his
strategy was mapped out by his father, Con, who died
in May: "I've heard his words all through the
Olympics. He didn't teach me for 20 years for me to
just walk out there and fail." Diamond's determined
training made perfectly sure of it.