Chapter 28 – The Answer That Isn’t an Answer

In early May, Gu Yiming devoted himself to a month of intensive preparation before heading to Munich for the second leg of the ISSF World Cup.

Xie Qingyun, hampered by injuries, unexpectedly faltered in the qualification round, ranking seventeenth and failing to advance to the finals. His new teammate gave his all, scoring 576 points in the qualification round, but was still eliminated by a one-point margin, also missing the finals. Gu Yiming scored 586 points, ranking second in the qualification round, becoming the sole representative of Team China in the men’s 10m air pistol finals at this leg.

The 10m range at the Munich leg was cramped, the most confined among all World Cup venues, with barely over three meters separating the spectator stands from the athletes’ firing positions. Before the match began, every word of conversation from the stands was audible, grating on the nerves. Gu Yiming put on his headphones and fired a few sighting shots, all landing around the nine-ring mark, scattered evenly. He stopped after that. This wasn’t a hardware issue. He lowered his head, massaging his shoulder, his gaze settling on his Morini pistol on the firing stand. The gun’s body was plastered with verification stickers, resembling the scarred body of a warrior.

During the athlete introductions, Gu Yiming faced the stands, locking eyes with his teammates and the coaching staff one by one. This time, Qin Shan was leading the team. Seeing Gu Yiming look his way, Qin spread his hands and pressed them downward in a gesture urging calm and relaxation. Gu Yiming knew they didn’t have high expectations for him. He was still in a slump, his training performances had been mediocre lately, and his total points after the second selection trials only ranked him third, one spot below his new teammate.

But Gu Yiming practiced shooting and competed not to meet anyone’s expectations or demands.

Unlike the currently popular technique of aiming with one eye closed, Gu Yiming didn’t use an eyepatch to block his left eye’s vision. He wore only a wide-brimmed cap to shield against overhead indoor lighting and headphones to mitigate the hearing damage from gunfire. Otherwise, he was dressed casually—a T-shirt, jacket, sweatpants—with a bottle of mineral water at his feet, as ordinary as any passerby outside the venue. His strength and vulnerability had no other source but himself and his gun.

Gu Yiming stood at the firing stand for a moment, exhaling slowly.

The match began.

Since two years ago, qualification round scores in precision pistol events no longer carried over to the finals. The rule changes at the end of last year increased the number of shots per scoring series from three to five. Under the new rules, the 10m air pistol finals consist of two scoring series of five shots each, followed by seven elimination rounds of two shots each. The eight finalists compete in a last-place elimination format during the elimination rounds.

Due to his shooting habits, Gu Yiming’s first shot was always unstable. He methodically loaded his pistol, stood sideways, braced his elbow, pressed his jaw to his shoulder, maintained his stance, and fired a low 8.5. Before the second shot, he adjusted his firing posture and scored a 9.3. The crowd erupted in cheers—someone at another firing stand must have scored a 10.9. Gu Yiming tuned it out, gripping his air pistol firmly, silently attuning himself to his body’s position and the dynamics of his movements.

The shooting stance is arguably the simplest among all sports: stand sideways to the firing stand, feet shoulder-width apart, left hand fixed in a pocket or on the hip for stability, right hand raising the gun, lifting lightly and lowering gently, jaw pressed to the right shoulder for aiming. It sounds simple enough for a seven-year-old to manage, but actual training is far from it.

The human body is remarkably dexterous, with so many movable joints that even slight unconscious movements can disrupt precision. Those movements aren’t entirely controllable. Adjusting one’s stance is a battle for control, wresting activities once governed by instinct and handing them over to reason and training. A single breath requires complete stillness, with every controllable muscle working in concert to resist the body’s natural rhythms—the very essence of coordination.

People often criticize shooters for unstable mental states and poor competition performances, but external pressure is merely the final straw that breaks the camel’s back. The thread has long been stretched taut and fragile by the daily tug-of-war between reason and instinct.

Gu Yiming’s first scoring series ended with 47.3 points, without a single ten-ring shot, placing him last among the eight finalists. The second series showed slight improvement—five shots totaling 50.5 points, bringing his cumulative score to 97.8, tying him for seventh place with another shooter, 2.1 points behind the sixth-place competitor. This was a gap significant enough for commentators to label it as such. Barring surprises, one of the two tied for seventh would be eliminated in the first round.

Gu Yiming checked the results on the scoreboard while listening to the rankings announced over the venue’s PA system, flexing his wrist slightly. The bad news was that he was just two shots away from elimination. The good news was that he was gradually regaining control of his body’s stance.

In the first elimination round, Gu Yiming scored 10.3 and 10.6. It was a solid performance, but not enough to guarantee his survival. He turned his head slightly to hear the elimination result announced by the referee—a deep male voice recited an unfamiliar name.

Good. He still had two more shots.

Gu Yiming reloaded. Had he glanced at the rankings, he would have seen that he was now just 0.1 point behind the sixth-place shooter—a negligible margin. But he didn’t look. He had to treat every shot as his last, with no room for complacency. He chose shooting; he owed it to himself to give his all.

Second elimination round: 10.2, 10.8. Gu Yiming’s second shot was outstanding, one of two 10.8s fired in that round, drawing thunderous applause from the stands. This was the nature of small venues—cheers and boos could sweep through the space effortlessly, even affecting athletes’ mental states.

These two shots propelled Gu Yiming past two competitors who had swapped places, moving him up to fifth. He paid no attention to this, only scanning the scoreboard for the eliminated name—not his.

He still had two more shots.

Third elimination round: 10.3, 10.2. The second-place qualifier, a hometown favorite, suddenly fired a 7.9, drawing a collective sigh from the crowd. His ranking dropped to fifth, while Gu Yiming climbed to fourth. The sixth-place Serbian veteran left the competition. Once again, Gu Yiming wasn’t the one eliminated.

Two more shots remained.

Fourth elimination round: 10.1, 10.3. The hometown shooter staged a dramatic comeback with a brilliant 10.7, tying Gu Yiming’s score after two shots. The crowd erupted. This was the most thrilling spectacle—a shoot-off.

The cruelty of the new format was also its brilliance, like tongues of fire licking at their backs. There was no moment of security—every shot was lethal. This most introspective and self-contained discipline had the most intense and nerve-wracking elimination method. Even temporary equilibrium was impossible.

Gu Yiming slowly reloaded. Before he could raise his pistol, he heard a shot from the neighboring stand. He didn’t know what score the other shooter had achieved—it didn’t matter.

Once, a sports reporter had confronted Qin Shan, asking why he had lost that year’s Olympic final when he only needed a 7.3 to win. Gu Yiming read the report and thought the journalist clearly knew nothing about shooting. Unlike choreographed sports like diving, figure skating, or gymnastics, shooting had no difficulty settings or base scores. Aiming for a 10.9 could indeed result in a fluke 7.3, but aiming solely for a 7.3 often meant failing to even achieve that. Shooting wasn’t truly a competition—ultimately, everyone’s opponent was themselves.

10.3 versus 10.1. The hometown shooter removed his headphones and eyepatch, attaching the safety flag.

Gu Yiming still had two shots.

The shoot-off slightly disrupted Gu Yiming’s rhythm. In the fifth round, he fired a 9.0, breaking his streak of ten-ring shots in the elimination rounds. His other shot was a 10.4. It wasn’t a safe score, but he wasn’t the only one to falter this round. With a 0.3-point lead over third place, Gu Yiming advanced to the medal round, trailing the second-place shooter by a mere 0.2 points.

Things grew interesting from here. The crowd roared and clapped. Those remaining were all formidable—unyielding yet fragile, any one of them capable of firing an irrecoverable seven-ring shot due to shifting applause, bizarre music, an unconscious tremor, prolonged aiming, or even their own breath and heartbeat.

The applause surged like tides, capriciously jostling the ferry of fate. Fifty seconds passed in a blink. Gu Yiming slowed his breathing, feeling the gradual pressure of his finger on the trigger. Quick aim, slow squeeze—because holding the aim too long would fatigue the arm, and squeezing too fast would disrupt precision. It was also because the slow breathing required for shooting had its limits. Muscular stillness defied nature; the body interpreted it as nearing death, protesting with subtle yet fatal disruptions. These were the instincts shooters had to fight.

This was the burden he had shouldered from the moment he chose shooting.

10.3.

The shooting time wasn’t over, but the crowd erupted in uproar. Gu Yiming had no capacity to process what had happened. He heard the command for the next fifty-second round and began reloading.

10.5.

It was a solid ten-ring shot. Gu Yiming lowered his pistol, listening for his ranking. He knew the second-place shooter from the previous round—a young Indian newcomer who had recently burst onto the international scene, a dark horse. A 20.8 score wasn’t safe against such an opponent. The earlier commotion might have meant the Indian had fired a 10.9.

Then the referee announced the results. The Indian shooter totaled 219.6 points, earning the bronze medal with a 1.2-point deficit.

Two shots remained.

This round’s score announcement was unusually drawn out. Gu Yiming finally learned why the crowd had erupted after his first shot—it was indeed a 10.9, but not from the Indian. It came from the only other remaining shooter, Tomoyuki Matsuda.

Gu Yiming knew him too. The pinnacle of any pyramid was narrow. He had encountered nearly all of the world’s top 50 shooters in competitions or recordings. Tomoyuki Matsuda was a 45-year-old veteran who had only begun shooting at 25, competing at 27—a late bloomer. He was the current world No. 1 in the 10m air pistol event.

With one round of two shots left, Gu Yiming’s total was 220.8 points, Matsuda’s 222.3—a 1.5-point “gap.” Being world No. 1 didn’t mean Matsuda won every World Cup leg, but it meant no one should expect him to falter with a lead. Gu Yiming had to shoot exceptionally, exceptionally well.

Gu Yiming’s first shot was slow. When he first raised his pistol, he aimed for a long time but resisted pulling the trigger—his intuition signaling his stance was off. He should have been fully focused, but he heard the shot from the neighboring stand and realized he’d been affected. The pressure was already on his shoulders; pretending otherwise was self-deception.

He decisively aborted the shot, adjusting his stance—feet, legs, waist, shoulders, neck, right arm holding the gun, right wrist controlling the motion, right hand gripping the pistol, index finger resting vertically outside the trigger.

A renowned intellectual in the air rifle world, the prodigious shooter Y once theorized that competitive shooters mastered their guns rather than being mastered by them. Athletes weren’t gun stocks or mounts—they weren’t part of the gun. Adhering to this principle, he extensively modified his rifle within competition rules. But such liberties were exclusive to air rifles with adjustable weights. In air pistol, your gun was your identity—Morini or Steyr. Precision, trigger weight, gun weight—these were factory-set, with only the grip curvature customizable.

Beyond that, in World Cup matches, the 10m air pistol target height was fixed at 1.4 meters. Recoil was consistent for the same pistol, and trajectory curvature was fixed under identical venue and temperature conditions. Shooting competitions were rigid—the only variables were people: the audience and the athletes. No one could control the audience except the ISSF’s rules, so the only thing Gu Yiming could adjust was himself.

With his gun, he could be so strong, yet in the end, all he could rely on was himself.

Thirteen seconds remained. Gu Yiming completed his shot. He didn’t scrutinize the score, only confirming it was an inner ten-ring before dismissing it from his mind. This wasn’t the end; it wasn’t time to dwell on results.

One shot left.

Gu Yiming silently listened to the referee’s reload command. Xie Qingyun had said his final two shots in the championship were aggressive—not just in score but in speed. It wasn’t unheard of for shooters to aim for over twenty seconds and still hit inner ten-rings—the women’s team’s rising star Z was a prime example—but generally, there was an optimal interval between raising the gun and firing. When Gu Yiming was truly in the zone, his timing was seamless, almost instinctive.

Twelve seconds.

Gu Yiming completed his final shot. The sensation was so perfect that he held his stance for several seconds before slowly lowering his arm. Matsuda had also finished firing. The crowd’s screams and cheers preceded the referee’s announcement. Gu Yiming faintly heard Matsuda had scored a 10.1, but nothing else registered.

Gu Yiming waited, confirming there wouldn’t be a second shoot-off, then glanced at the scoreboard. The LCD screen displayed the latest shot’s mark on the bullseye, with the match’s per-shot and total scores on the right. His final round was 10.6 and 10.9—two beautiful inner ten-rings. Matsuda’s scores were listed below—9.7 and 10.1—also respectable.

What was the total? Who won?

Gu Yiming blanked for a moment. As he opened the pistol’s chamber to insert the safety flag, he did the math in his head. Matsuda seemed to have 242.1 points. What about him? What was 10.6 plus 10.9?

Then the scoreboard refreshed, listing the final rankings in order. Gu Yiming saw his name at the top.

Oh. He had won.