Nineteen-year-old U.S. Olympian Virginia Thrasher won the first gold medal awarded at this year’s Olympic games in Rio, Brazil.
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The teenager, a sophomore at West Virginia University is now an Olympic Gold Medalist, and also qualifies as the youngest member of USA’s shooting team.
As those events conclude, this list above will be updated to show the full medal results for day one of the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Yi earned gold at the 2012 games in a similar fashion to Thrasher, as she was only three years into her worldwide shooting career.
United States of America are back at numero uno position on the medals tally of Rio Olympics with 12 medals, including three gold.
In the air rifle competition, shooters use pellets with a flat fronts that leave clean holes in the paper target that determines scoring. She began hitting the range the same month as the London Olympics. She wasn’t the favorite coming in as Du won gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics. “This year has been incredible” Thrasher said.
Over the years, you’ve come to know that the champion athletes all have certain skills – both physical and mental.
“I heard the cheers and the horns and it was very disturbing”, Yi said. “I just want to continue that attitude going into the Olympics and all of my future matches”. The biomedical engineering student only entered elite competition past year, and had placed no higher than seventh in World Cup competition.
Thrasher was not expected to be among the top five scorers – all that counts in NCAA competition – at shooting powerhouse West Virginia, yet got better as the season progressed.
Sarah Scherer, Thrasher’s 25-year-old teammate, finished eighth among the event’s 50 competitors. India have never won multiple gold medals in any Olympic games and may want to create a new piece of history.
“I would go figure skate in the morning and then go to school and then go to rifle practice right after”, she said. Thrasher, a biomedical engineering major, will begin her classes on August 17.
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“For me, having that less expectation maybe has helped me”, she said, “but now I’m ready to handle that expectation and to go forward with my career”. Although the squad -comprised of Sam Mikulak, Chris Brooks, Alex Naddour, Danell Leyva, and Jake Dalton- qualified second for the team final, they got off to a disappointing start on floor exercise and weren’t able to mount an effective comeback in time.
