George Achilleos is ranked as the world’s No 1 skeet shooter, a position he had achieved through dogged dedication. He is now looking towards the London Olympics. THEO PANAYIDES meets him
George Achilleos is currently the most successful Cypriot athlete. He may even – though this is just a guess, with apologies if I’m forgetting any obvious candidates – be the most successful Cypriot athlete of all time. He’s a dominant figure, ranked No. 1 in the world, in a long-standing (albeit relatively obscure) Olympic sport, namely skeet shooting. He’s our best chance – I almost said our best shot! – for that most elusive thing, Cyprus’ first-ever Olympic medal. Yet, when I meet him in the lobby of the Hilton Park in Nicosia, I don’t even recognise him.
We meet at 10am, which is on the early side when you consider that it’s Saturday and George lives in Limassol – but in fact he never stays up late, nor does he really do weekends. He comes to our interview straight from a session with the sports psychologist he sees every couple of weeks (she flies in specially from Greece); after we’re done, he’ll be heading off to the shooting range for a couple of hours’ practice. I arrive a few minutes early, and text him that I’m waiting in the lobby. Right on time, a somewhat scruffy, stubbled young man barrels by me in tracksuit top and faded jeans, talking on the phone. He nods slightly, and I give him a cursory nod in return. He looks like he might be a courier delivering parcels – so I’m quite surprised, and embarrassed, when he hangs up the phone and stands politely at one of the tables, waiting for me to join him.
This wouldn’t have happened with Marcos Baghdatis, his fellow Limassolian and probably the second-most-successful Cypriot athlete. Does George ever wish he were as high-profile as the iconic Baggy? Not really, he shrugs; “It’s a big hassle to feel that whatever you do is going to be criticised, because you’re well-known”. Just to feel a bit more appreciated, though? Look, he replies, “we live in a country where there’s only football and Baghdatis!” He laughs: “I respect that”.
Then again, he’s quite lucky to have been born in this particular country, given his talents. I hadn’t realised before, but Cyprus is something of a powerhouse when it comes to skeet shooting: we currently have two men in the top 10 – Antonakis Andreou is at No. 4 – and the World Championships have been staged in Nicosia three times, in 1995, 2003 and 2007. “It’s something like our traditional sport,” says George, like the Chinese have table tennis – though this only applies to skeet, not trap or double trap which are the other clay-pigeon shooting Olympic events. Has he ever tried his hand at those? Just for fun, he replies, but they’re very different – as different from skeet as football is from basketball, he adds surprisingly. The main difference seems to be that targets are thrown from either side (crossing in the air) in skeet, whereas they get catapulted straight up in front of the shooter in the trap events – which doesn’t sound like that big a difference, but I guess that’s why I’m a layman and George is a skeet-shooting champion.
What actually makes skeet fascinating – especially at George’s level – isn’t so much the sport as the psychological pressure it exerts. Most events last two days (usually a weekend) in which athletes have to shoot 150 targets in six sessions of 25. The first session is on Saturday morning, the last on Sunday afternoon – and the result, invariably, is that almost all the top shooters hit almost all their targets. If you miss one clay disc (out of 150), you might lose the top spot; if you miss two, you’re already looking at a place outside the top three – so you have to be “absolutely ready” throughout, explains George. It’s not like tennis, he adds (possibly thinking of Baghdatis again), where you might lose the first set but win the other two. Nor can you afford to be brilliant all day Saturday and Sunday morning, only to relax (and miss) on Sunday afternoon. Just to give an example, George came 5th in the Beijing Olympics – a big disappointment, by his standards – but if he’d hit one more target, he’d have won the bronze medal. Two more, and he might’ve won gold.
Skeet is “not a sport where talent is all that counts,” he explains. It’s not like running, where “God gave you speed” and you just have to work on your physical fitness, “it’s not just a gift… The real work is done with the psychologist, and within yourself”. It’s about being calm and self-confident, relaxing the body and mind – being neither discouraged by failure nor complacent in the face of success.
It’s no surprise to hear that George has tried meditation to improve his game. Nowadays he spends hours doing “visualisation” techniques, where you visualise yourself shooting; sometimes, just before a target appears “I’ll see the disc [in my mind], and I see myself hitting it cleanly, and getting a good shot”. It improves his self-confidence, which is surely the most important factor along with concentration and experience: the best shooters are usually over 30 – he himself turned 30 in December – because they’ve matured psychologically. “You often win a match before the match has even started,” he points out. “Or else you often miss a target before you even shoot at it.”
One complicating factor in skeet is that athletes get 10 seconds to compose themselves after each shot, at the end of which they call out for the next disc to be thrown. What do they do during those 10 seconds? “Most of the time it’s something personal,” says George warily. “Maybe nothing. Some athletes don’t want to think of anything – they just want to open the gun, reload, close it and shout out. Some might want to take a step back, take two breaths then get back in position. Some might say something to themselves.” He pauses: “Like me, for instance”.
He always says the same thing every time, before every shot – like a Buddhist monk with his mantra, and indeed talking to an athlete is a lot like talking to a monk. It’s inspiring, because they’re so serene and candid and coherent – so apparently free of the usual insecurities – yet, when you look back on the conversation, you find they only really talked about one thing, because that’s all they know. Sport is increasingly taking the place of religion in secular societies, and for much the same reason: because its high priests have devoted their lives entirely to something greater than themselves.
For George Achilleos, it began at age 13, when he first started training on a regular basis. Shooting had always been his dad’s hobby, and he’d often gone to the range as a child to watch his father and take a few pops himself – but 1993 was when he started getting serious, and 1998 (when he came second in the European Junior Championships being held in Nicosia) was when he realised that “yes, I have a talent” and decided not to study Accountancy in the UK after all, instead getting his degree at Cyprus College in between training sessions. “I didn’t set out to make this a way of life, it started out entirely as a hobby… But I ended up loving this sport.”
What was he like as a young man? “I was very closed-off as a teenager,” he recalls. “Both with other people, and as a person generally.” One assumes he liked the introspective nature of shooting, the way it required nothing but his own inner strength. After all, he’s never been enamoured of guns per se; “I’m not the kind of person who’ll have a gun collection, or go hunting”. (He takes great pains over his own gun – a Beretta DT10, custom-made to his own specifications – but that’s part of the sport.) I wonder if shooting also eased a slight awkwardness which he may have felt as a young teen in Cyprus, having grown up partly in England (he was born in London) where his dad owned a clothes factory – though he says that was never an issue, and besides the family were always very Cypriot, speaking Greek at home and going to Greek school on the weekends.
He’s practised almost every day since the age of 13 – a simple fact that encompasses thousands of man-hours (and hundreds of thousands of smashed clay pigeons). As already mentioned, he seldom stays up late, “otherwise I feel the difference in my body straight away”. His mornings are spent at the shooting range, then he’ll go home for lunch, rest a while then do one of three things – either a massage, or a session at the gym, or an hour with the sports psychologist – in the afternoon. He has no real hobbies, though he likes a game of football on the weekend. It’s almost a surprise to discover that he’s married, with a four-year-old son – and his wife Vicky is a filmmaker by training but it sounds like there’s been a division of labour, with Vicky taking care of the home front while George pursues his No. 1 ranking. “My opinion,” he says, “is there has to be a joint effort by the whole team, the whole family. Everyone has their role to play”. At the moment, they’re devoting themselves to his career because “I have a time limit. Another two or three Olympic Games, then we can devote ourselves to [Vicky’s] career.”
Ah yes, the Olympics. London 2012 is going to be huge, as he tries to make up for the disappointment of Beijing and potentially win a gold medal in the city where he was born (for added symmetry). Can he really do it, this unpretentious, soft-spoken man with his soft eyes and stubble and heavy boxer’s nose – who admits he’s already thinking about the Olympics, then chuckles modestly and says “God knows” – can he really be the best in the world? Then again, he already is.
George Achilleos has been lucky. Being a skeet shooter, a sport we take seriously in Cyprus, he’s received solid support from the powers-that-be: the Cyprus Sports Organisation has helped out financially since his teenage triumph at the European Junior Championships, and his Accountancy degree also allows for a well-paid sinecure as Financial Consultant to the Cyprus Shooting Federation. But luck, in itself, can’t explain this kind of success. George is also organised, driven and extremely disciplined – so much so, in fact, that it often leaks into his private life. “Many times I catch myself taking things a bit more seriously than I should, not being able to relax – and I tell myself ‘Come on, I’m not at the shooting range. I don’t have a match tomorrow!’” he admits, a bit shamefacedly. “But some things just come by themselves.”
What’s the attraction? What’s his secret? Why is he the world’s best skeet shooter? “Look,” he says with a kind of helpless shrug, “because I started from a young age, I think the shooting range is a way of life for me. I mean, it’s the place where I relax, it’s also my work – it’s the place where I know what to do better than anything else. I’ve been doing it for 18 years.”
He pauses, not knowing what else he can say: “Ummm…”. He shakes his head, trying to put it into words. “It’s the sport I love – the sport I live for, let’s say.” George Achilleos looks at me with his candid, serene athlete’s expression: “This is what I know how to do.”
