Eric Ang Profile

AGE: 37 years old

SPORT: Shooting, men’s

EXPERIENCE: 1st-time Olympian

MEDALS: Bronze medalist, Southeast Asian Games 2005 and ’07 Three-time participant, Asian Games 1998, ’02 and ’06

ONE of Eric Ang’s closest buddies surely knows a lot about the sport of shooting. And in terms of Olympic participation and the expectations of it, Ang’s friend is somebody who’s soaked up on the rare experience, somebody who Ang, the lone RP shooter in the China Olympiad, can talk to about the possibilities in Beijing.

“I’ve been friends with Jethro I think since I started shooting,” Ang said, referring to Jethro Dionisio the country’s Olympic shooter in the 2002 Athens Games.

“All he says to me is to just have fun and do my best. He’s helped me with some of my techniques, what needs to be done to come up with a good finish. And I’ve been listening to him and hopefully things work out well for me,” he added.

Ang, like his sport, hasn’t enjoyed mainstream attention but RP shooters have been delivering the goods in international competition and for a time, on the Olympic stage.

Since 1932, the country failed to send a shooter to the Olympics only once (in 1988).

Filipino shooters used to participate in the Olympics in bunches, a batch of seven or eight of them competing in one Olympiad (the most being nine in the 1964 Tokyo Games).

Martin Gison, a versatile shooter who was adept with the pistol and the rifle, owns the record for the most Olympic participations by a Filipino (with five). In the 1936 Berlin Games, Gison, then 22 years old, finished fourth in the men’s 50m prone-position small-bore rifle event, one of the closest Filipino shooters have been to winning a medal.

The number of RP Olympic shooters has fallen drastically since that era but because it is a sport that doesn’t expose the Filipino’s normally small physique (that’s proven to be disadvantageous in other sports), shooting can be considered a potential source of Olympic gold.

“[Winning] the gold medal is very possible,” Ang, 37, said. “I’ve always been waiting for this opportunity. For me, the gold medal in Beijing is just within reach.”

Ang, like Dionisio, started as a practical shooter in 1989. Wanting to make it to the Olympics, Ang shifted to trap shooting in 1996. Since then, he’s starred in three Asian Games and six Southeast Asian Games.

His most recent accolades on the SEA Games level are a couple of bronze medals (men’s trap in 2005 and with Dionisio and Carlos Carag in men’s trap team event in 2007).

Last year, Ang missed the qualifying mark for the Olympics by just a few points during the Asian Shooting Championships in Kuwait. And in the pre-Olympic shooting tournament in Beijing held last April 12-20, he placed only 24th among 92 participants.

But on the strength of his performance in those two events, Ang, a full-time businessman who handles distribution of LPG tanks, received a wild-card berth to the Olympics from the International Shooting Sport Federation.

Ang also appeared in the Germany and Serbia and Montenegro legs of the ISSF-backed World Cup in June. In Germany, he broke the RP record by firing 121 out of 125 birds to place seventh in a strong field of 87 participants. (The previous record was 119.)

Weeks before he flew off to Beijing, Ang was practicing in his shooting range in Laoag City.“I didn’t expect I would shoot that well. That was a breakthrough for me,” Ang said about his performance in Germany. “In that event, I realized that I could also stand up and compete against the best of the world.”