Slovakia won two medals in today's men's junior Trap. Filip Praj won the gold, and Adrian Drobny won the bronze at the second junior event of the 2015 ISSF Shotgun World Championship in Lonato, Itay. Shooting in his home country, Luca Miotto won the silver.
Praj, 20, won the gold after a close competition with Miotto, 19 - who had won the semifinal with a perfect 15 hits. The two shooters were in a tie until the second-last target in the gold medal match. Then, Miotto missed. Praj did not, and won the gold.
In the early stages of the gold medal match, Praj took the lead. He hit all of his targets in the first series, while Miotto missed one.
In the next series, Praj missed a target and Miotto caught up with him. The tie continued throughout the competition until Miotto's late miss gave Praj the gold medal (13-12).
This was Praj's first gold in an ISSF competition. Five years ago in Munich, he had won a bronze medal in a World Championship. He also won two gold medals and one silver medal at European Championships in Belgrade and Maribor in the past four years.
Miotto's silver was also his first ISSF medal.
Drobny, 20, beat his peer David Barquero of Spain to win the bronze (12-9).
Barquero started losing ground in the first series of the bronze medal match, as he missed one target while Drobny hit all of his. Drobny's lead increased to three targets in the second series, when Barquero missed two targets and Drobny missed none.
On the 10th target came Drobny's first miss. But the margin he had built earlier in the match let him win the bronze anyway - his career's first medal.
Before he entered the bronze medal match, Drobny had to go through a shoot-off against Mitchell William Iles-Crevatin.
Australia's Iles-Crevatin and Drobny were tied with 10 hits in the semifinal. In the shoot-off, Drobny won by 4-3. The 16-year-old Iles-Crevatin came in fifth.
Maxim Kabatskiy of the Russian Federation, at his first time in an ISSF competition, came in sixth (9 hits).
In the team event, the Russian Federation came atop the podium. Kabatskiy's hit 118 targets; Nikita Bekasov and Nikita Egorov, 112 each. With a total of 342 hits, Russia took the gold.
Slovakia came in second (337). Michal Slamka joined Praj and Drobny on the podium. Australia (Iles-Crevatin, Wallace, and Bylsma) took the bronze with 333 hits.
"I feel very happy," gold medalist Praj says. "I had very hard training to win this. A long time, a long training."
"It was very hard to win because the Italian shooter [Miotto] was also very good."
"This is a graduation of my experience," says Praj, who won the gold medal at his last competition as a junior - next year, he'll become a senior. "I'll try to be very good in men['s events]."