What’s worth more than Oly gold?
Three-time champion Campriani found true meaning of life when his audacious project to help refugees qualify for Olympics started taking shape
Most of the athletes find it tough to pick a time and place for their retirement. However, when Niccolo Campriani left the shooting range at the Rio Olympic Games with the 50m 3-positions rifle gold medal, the sharpshooter - one of the most successful Olympic athlete - had no second thoughts.
With three gold medals in two editions, the Italian admitted that after retirement, it was a question of finding some meaning after spending 16 years staring and shooting at a piece of paper.
“When I started to shoot in 2000 at the age of 13, the focus was to go to the Olympics one day. After winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics, there was a void…. What next? So I kept shooting and passion became an obsession.
“Four hours of shooting became 12 hours and I could have gone on endlessly. But I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. My mind was made up that it (the Rio Games) would be the last competitive event of my life,” said Campriani, as he unveiled “Taking Refuge”, a five-part series partnering Abhinav Bindra, which premiered on the Inter national Olympic Committee’s (IOC) global media platform.
Despite that, Campriani battled on and at Rio 2016 he added two more golds to his tally from London 2012. Despite the medals, the sense of satisfaction eluded the Italian marksman.
The 34-year-old found meaning three years after retirement, when his audacious project to help refugees qualify for Olympics started taking shape.
With shooters having only 500 days to make the cut for Tokyo 2020, Campriani pointed out that it was a ‘challenge within a challenge’ considering it’s nearly impossible to earn an Olympic quota in one year of starting the sport.
Campriani considers the day he held the first training session with the three shooters ― Mahdi, Khaoula and Luna ― as one of the happiest moments of his sporting career.
“And it happened after I had retired,” he said. “So that’s the message I want to send out to all athletes who are struggling with retirement. Life goes on beyond your career.”
The Italian has been crystal clear from the beginning that the project is not just about helping a group of refugees but It’s about using the true power of sport to help them forge a new identity.
“I don’t agree with the equation that a gold medal equals happiness. We do have to right to be unhappy. It’s not that because we have won gold at the Olympics we’re the happiest people in the world. At the end of the day, it’s about being passionate and loving what you do. It’s so important to pass this message to every athlete that they may not find happiness atop the podium. It’s about working on yourself. The last shot at the Olympics is not going to define who you are,” Campriani said.
Campriani revealed that while he was selecting athletes for his project, he got every one of the contenders to tell him why they wanted to be picked.
“I was looking for something more than ‘I want to go to the Olympics,’” said Campriani.
The project in itself is quite audacious. It took Campriani eight years to win a quota for his first Olympics at Beijing after picking up the sport in 2000. Even reaching the Minimum Qualifying Score (MQS) takes two-three years, according to him.
“The tricky part is that ideally any athlete first competes in regional competitions, then nationals and so on. Then you get to the international level. But for these three, their first competition was an international one.”
Despite that, Mahdi (at the Asian Championships) and Khaoula (at the European Championships) have achieved the Minimum Qualification Scores.
Campriani has chosen to look at the bright side despite the fact that postponement would increase costs for the project.
“The postponement means 364 more days of training. For someone who was aiming to go the Olympics with just 500 days of training it’s a gamechanger,” he said.
“It’s so important to pass this message to every athlete that they may not find happiness atop the podium... The last shot at the Olympics is not going to define who you are”