The American defied her mother, ignored taunts, to pursue the sport
PUNE: Living in a country which allows its citizens possession of firearms, Mary Tucker had to hide her shooting aspirations from her mother when she started training for the sport five years ago. It took a lot of hard work and an Olympics medal to convince her mother that she was going to be fine in the sport.
"My high school had a shooting team. My mother had told me that I could join any team but the shooting team. But I joined the shooting team," the 21-year-old Florida resident told TOI after winning the 10m air rifle silver at the ongoing ISSF World Cup in Bhopal on Friday.
"I went to the trials without informing her. When I made it to the team, I told her, 'Oh by the way, I have been selected for the shooting team.' She was not happy when she got to know about it," Mary said.
Mary's mother feared the guns would harm her daughter. "She didn't like guns and she was worried that it was going to be dangerous," the West Virginia University student said.
However, things have changed at the Tucker household. "Now she likes it and has become a very big advocate of shooting as a sport," Mary said.
Mary, who had won gold at the 2021 World Cup in Delhi, started shooting at 16. But it was not as easy as she had thought, as people around her always doubted her capabilities.
"A lot of doubt came from people around me because I was the youngest in the team. I was 16 when I started. I didn't even watch the Rio Olympics and when I started shooting in 2017, I said, 'I am going to be in the Olympics' and everybody was like the Olympics are only in three years, you won't make it. When I made it to the team, they said 'okay, but you won't win'," she said. "And I proved them wrong."
Despite winning an Olympic medal, Mary said she is not a popular name in the US.
"Not many people know what we do. Unlike a track & field athlete or a swimmer who wins at the Olympics, we are not celebrities. Sometimes even when I tell people that I am an Olympic medallist, I get responses like 'oh, I should start shooting, so I can win too' and I tell them that it is not that easy and you have to work a lot to achieve that. The same people see basketball and swimming and say that winning an Olympic medal is so difficult in these sports," she said.
Mary, who couldn't win an individual medal due to a malfunction in her rifle at the Tokyo Olympics, is determined to do well at the Paris Games. "Don't tell me I can't do that because I am just going to do that," she laughed.
