Women’s 10m Air Pistol National Champion Lee Shiyun
An elementary school student with a toy gun instead of a doll.
Cheers from the crowd as she hits all 20 pellets.
Calmly competing in her first international competition
National women’s air rifle shooter Lee Si-yoon (Imsil-gun) covers her left eye and stares at the target as she prepares to fire at the Jeonbuk Comprehensive Shooting Range in Imsil-gun, North Jeolla Province, on June 6. Lee, who won first place in the 10-meter air pistol event at the national trials in March, will make his international debut at the Hangzhou Asian Games in September. Im Sil=Park Young-cheol Reporter skyblue@donga.com
“If it wasn’t for the monk’s ‘prophecy,’ I might be holding scissors instead of a gun right now.”
Lee Si-yoon (20-Imsil-gun), the national women’s 10-meter air pistol champion, said this at the Jeonbuk National Shooting Center in Imsil-gun, Jeollabuk-do, on Sept. 6. Lee is the youngest daughter of a hairdresser. Both of her parents and her only sister are salon owners. As a child, she played with curling irons and hair rollers.
The “gun” came when she was in first grade. Her brother, a high school relative, brought a BB gun to play with during the holidays. “I couldn’t get enough of the silver eagle on a black background,” he recalls. On the way home, her brother said, “This is beautiful. Can’t you give it to me?” He eventually had to give up the gun to a sobbing younger relative.
Lee used it to “zero in” on trees and road signs. It didn’t matter how much her parents scolded her, saying, “You’re a girl, you don’t have a gun, you need to behave.” It wasn’t until three years later that her parents recognized her shooting skills. When the family found a BB gun shooting booth at Ilsan Beach in Ulsan, he shouted “3,000 won!” to his parents and left, returning with a beautiful doll and cushion. He fired 20 non-bullet rounds at the “mulga-jeong” (far, near, center) bull’s-eye targets and scored a “perfect score.
Watching her daughter covet the guns in the shooting booth more than the prizes, her mother, Kang Eun-soon, 52, remembered a story told by the abbot of Cheongsuam. After her husband Lee Min-seung, 57, underwent a liver transplant in 2008, when Lee was in kindergarten, Kang used to pray at the temple in Ulju County, Ulsan. One day, the abbot suddenly said, “My youngest daughter will discover a talent before she reaches the fifth grade,” and urged her to “push her forward, not stop her.”
She started shooting formally in the fifth grade, but “zeroing” and “live fire” are different. While she could easily reach the podium, the top was a long way off. “Before I won my first national gold medal, I was runner-up four times in a row, and I often came in second place in middle and high school, so I got the nickname ‘2ShiYun,'” Lee laughs.
It wasn’t until last year, when he joined the Imsil County Government, that Lee became familiar with “1:00”. “He had a good natural sense, but his posture before firing was very shaky and unstable,” said Kwak Min-soo, 44, director of the Imsil County Office. Kwak suggested “stopping power improvement training,” in which he held a gun weighing about 2 kilograms and a 500-gram weight in a firing position for one minute. After this training, Lee dominated the domestic scene, sweeping the Daegu Mayor’s Cup, the Korea Shooting Federation President’s Cup, and the Hanwha President’s Cup last year.
In March of this year, he won the Taekwondo mark by placing first in the national selection trials. Lee will make his international debut at the Hangzhou Asian Games in September. “I don’t feel particularly pressured or nervous,” said Lee, who forms the ‘youngest trio’ in the shooting team alongside Yang Jijin (25m pistol) and Jang Jung-in (10m air rifle). “I don’t usually get excited before a big event,” he said. “I have a medal rack at home, and I can’t wait to add another gold medal to it, 카지노사이트 and hopefully it will be a gold medal at the Hangzhou Asian Games.
