Ray Bassil, a trap shooter from Lebanon, has announced that she will be competing in the Tokyo Olympics in the hopes of winning a medal and bringing some cheer to her countrymen who are struggling financially.
R. Bassil Olympic Games Tokyo 2020
They are pinning their hopes on the 32-year-old athlete because the Mediterranean country has not won a medal since 1980, when they won bronze in Greco-Roman wrestling in Moscow.
She aimed her shotgun at a clay pigeon and waited for it to be thrown across the sky at a shooting range north of Beirut.
On July 28 and 29, in one of her final practises before the competition, she wore a dress covered head to toe in images of Lebanon’s iconic cedar tree.
At the Safra shooting club, she declared, “My goal is to win an Olympic gold, not merely take part.”
The people of my country deserve some good news, and I want to deliver it.
At the age of 14, Bassil began shooting with her father, Jack.
She entered her first international competition in Algeria when she was only 16 years old.
Since then, she has risen in both regional and global standings, even taking home the gold medal at a World Cup tournament in 2016.
In the trap shooting competition at the London Olympics, she placed 18th, and at the most recent Summer Olympics in Rio, she placed 14th.
A call to “Bring Hope”
Bassil has been working hard in preparation for the next competition in Japan.
She caught Covid-19 earlier this year and immediately went back to training, at first in the parking lot below her building despite Lebanon’s 24-hour coronavirus restriction.
After leaving the “negative influences” of home, she travelled to a shooting range in the Italian town of Massa Martana.
To better hone her abilities and train for the Olympics, she required “more appropriate settings.”
More than half of Lebanon’s population now lives below the poverty line as the country suffers through its greatest economic crisis in modern history.
Soaring prices, gasoline and pharmaceutical shortages, and constant outages have made life difficult for hundreds of thousands.
There hasn’t been a completely functional administration in place for over 11 months, and the wealthy have fled the country in search of a better life elsewhere.
There has been no accountability for those responsible for a deadly port explosion last summer, and public outcry has only increased as a result.
According to Bassil, her attention span is short and she must concentrate.
Understandably, the situation in Lebanon is dire. All of us have reached a mental and physical state of exhaustion. However, she emphasised that she did not wish to be negatively affected by the situation.
I hope to alter our perspective and give the people of Lebanon a sigh of relief. Perhaps Lebanon’s sports scene can serve as a source of optimism.
“No nation state”
According to Bassil, getting ready for Tokyo has been difficult because of banking limitations that have prevented individuals from accessing their savings.
“It wasn’t even Easy to get the Bullets,” she Moaned.
I had to enlist the aid of friends and family in Italy and a few locals in Lebanon to get them sent to the Lebanese capital.
She claims she was able to raise the bare minimum needed to compete in Japan by approaching private sponsors in addition to the sports ministry and the national Olympic committee.
There will be six athletes from Lebanon at the Tokyo Games, and the trap shooter is one of them.
In addition to the judoka Nacif Elias, the weightlifter Mahassen Fattouh, and the sprinter Noureddine Hadid are also among them.
Lebanon’s swimming team will consist of male swimmer Munzer Kabbara and female swimmer Gabriella Doueihy.
The performance of Bassil and his fellow athletes is “critical” to the success of his country.
In contrast, “(but) what I want to do is for me and my family and the Lebanese people, not for any government.”