The headquarters of the Pardini Armi company in northern Italy recently hosted an international troupe of seven American and Swiss operators from the Olympic Channel – the official media platform of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – for the shooting of the third episode of Taking Refuge: Target Tokyo 2020, a mini-series that will be aired on the Olympic Channel in early 2020.

The project was strongly backed by Niccolò Campriani, a three-times gold medalist and silver medalist at the 2012 London and 2016 Rio olympics – who currently holds the world record for olympic medals in rifle shooting. He has retired from competition after the 2016 Rio olympics, and is now working at the International Olympic Committee as a Sports Intelligence Manager.

As the 2020 Tokyo olympics get closer, Niccolò Campriani decided to invest his passion for shooting sports and his attention for social issues in a personal project aimed to give hope to many refugees – whose representative team already had a chance to compete at the Rio games under the IOC banner.

Campriani's project tackles the issue of mass migration – one of the greatest challenges of the 21st Century – and its goal is to introduce three young newcomers to olympic air rifle shooting and give them enough training in one year so that they would have a shot to be selected by the IOC for an olympic card and give sport shooting a socially positive impact that nobody could ignore.

As Campriani stated, the olympic card for the three selected athletes is "a means, not the end": the true end is to raise popular attention on a much more important topic.

In the initial phase of the project, documented in the first episode of the mini-series, Niccolò Campriani selected the three shooters that are currently undergoing training with him: Mahdi, age 22, from Afghanistan; Khaoula, age 30, from Arabia; and Luna, age 25, from rural Africa.

After a few months of training, the three newcomers in the "Campriani Team" had their first chance to take part to an official competition during the 2019 Italian National Shooting Championship, held in the city of Bologna in July.

In Campriani's own words, « a retired athlete normally lives a phase of redefinition of his or her identity, which is basically the same thing that a newcomer in a new Country goes through when he has to start back from scratch and rebuild a new self.»

With this initial and his responsibility as an olympic medalist, Niccolò Campriani intends to give back something that sports gave to him.
Pardini Armi, in the light of their long-term collaboration relationships with Campriani – the Company manufactures the GPR1 air rifle that Campriani himself helped engineer back in 2013 – was all too happy to support this strongly impacting social initiative providing technical support and guns to the shooters of the Campriani Team.