Beretta at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games
The 2024 Paris Olympics have started: 117 shooters will be gunning for eighteen medals in the Trap, Skeet, and Mixed Skeet disciplines, and well over half of them will be using a Beretta shotgun!
The 2024 Olympic Games have kicked off in Paris, France, and the air is electric at Chateauroux, where clay shooting competitions will be held. Just a few hours shy of the first match, all spotlights are on the best Beretta international shooting team ever.
117 shooters will take stage at the Shooting Centre this year with hopes to secure, or confirm, their place in the halls of fame of Trap, Skeet, and (for the first time this year) Mixed Skeet shooting. 54,7% of them all will be gunning for gold with a Beretta shotgun.
The Beretta shooter Jessica Rossi
The Beretta shooter Giovanni Pellielo
The Beretta team joins the main sports event of the year with a great heritage and a long story of Olympic success, rooted in the first Olympic Gold medal won with a Beretta shotgun by Galliano Rossini at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. Since then, and up until the Tokyo Olympics, shooters using Beretta shotguns won 57 medals overall, 21 of which being gold.
The 2024 edition represent the sixteenth olympics that Beretta shotguns have been taking part to: a long history of dedication and technological advancement, unmateched by the gun industry worldwide.
The Beretta shooter Fatima Galvez
The Beretta shooter Vincent Hancock
Taking part to this long and exciting olympic journey is a shooter who brough home a veritable cascade of medals using Beretta shotguns: twenty times Euripean champion, seventeen times world champion, and four times an Olympic medal winner (three gold, one bronze).
We're of course talking about Giovanni “Johnny” Pellielo, 54 years old and hailing all the way from Piedmont: he will be taking part to his eighth olympic games this year, a record that only Raimondo and Piero D’Inzeo and Josefa Idem could match among Italian olympic athletes.
“My secret? – Pellielo explained – I never turned my sport into a job, but always as a passion. I never stopped believing in my passion”.
The Beretta shooter Jiri Liptak
The roster of great shooters who will be fielding Beretta shotguns this year is quite long. Most of them will be using Beretta DT11 over-and-under shotguns – a legend, an icon of olympic skeet and trap shooting, a tool that brought more than a shooter on the podium – but at least one of them, more specifically Mauro De Filippis with the Italian national team, will be shooting the latest entry in Beretta's competition shotguns line: the SL2 over-and-under shotgun.
We can't make any prediction about the outcome, but with sixty-four shooters from all around the world using Beretta shotguns, the chances of winning a considerable portion of the eighteen medals at stake are high. Beretta is definitely hoping to break the record of the Rio 2016 games, when shooters using their shotguns won four gold medals, four silver, and two bronze overall.
Other world-class shooters using Beretta shotguns at the 2024 Paris Olympics include Vincent Hancock, a Skeet prodigy hailing all the way from the US and gunning for his fourth olympic medal; Jiri Liptak (Czech Republic), who hopes to go for seconds after his success in Trap shooting at the Tokyo Olympics; and Lucie Anastassiou and Eric Delaunay, with the French national team, who will be competing as a pair in Mixed Skeet.
The Beretta shooter Diana Bacosi
A special mention goes to Diana Bacosi, the "Italian Queen of Skeet", with an olympic gold and a silver medal already under her belt.
Speaking of women, Spanish shooter Fatima Gomez, who won a gold medal in Mixed Trap at the Tokyo olympics, will be taking a shot at an individual gold medal this year. But above all, Jessica Rossi will be under the spotlight as she tries to get to the top step of the podium again after her débacle at the Tokyo olympics and the solid and intense training she underwent in the past years ahead of the Paris edition. Same goes for Silvana Stanco and Tammaro Cassandro, two additional members of the Italian national team.
But the good name of Beretta will not only be represented by shooters at the Paris Olympics: the company put six trips to the Olympic Games for two, and as many free tickets to the games, up for grabs for their workers.
The winners had to... gun for the prize in a clay shooting competition that was held a few days ago at a shooting range in northern Italy, not far from the Beretta plant. Because, for Beretta, passions are best lived together; that's why the company decided to present similar awards to six shooting ranges and three gun stores in Italy, chosen for their performance.
PROGRAM OF EVENTS
TRAP MEN – July 30, h.3:30 p.m.
TRAP WOMEN – July 31, h.3:30 p.m.
SKEET MEN – August 3, h.3:30 p.m.
SKEET WOMEN – August 4, h.3 p.m.
SKEET MIXED TEAM – August 5, h.3 p.m.