Romain Aufrere (pictured) is one of several athletes who will defend titles as the third ISSF Junior World Championships start tomorrow in Lima.
The 19-year-old Frenchman, who competed in the 10m air rifle and 50m rifle 3 positions at his home Olympics this summer, won gold in both events at last year’s edition of these stand-alone Championships in Changwon, South Korea.
Aufrere will be one of 536 athletes from 50 nations involved in competition which gets underway in earnest on Saturday at the Las Palmas Shooting Range.
The double champion is one of 20 French athletes competing, and his team-mates include fellow Paris 2024 Olympian Oceanne Muller, who won the 10m air rifle women junior world title in Lima three years ago.
The pair will team up in an attempt to go one better than the silver they won in the 10m air rifle mixed team in Changwon last year.
Muller, fifth in 10m air rifle women at the last two Olympics, finished fifth in last year’s final in Changwon and will once again face the 2023 gold and silver medallists, respectively 17-year-olds Synnoeve Berg of Norway and Wang Zifei of China.
The Peruvian capital hosted the first separate ISSF Junior World Championships – involving rifle, pistol and shotgun – in 2021.
In 2022 junior world title competition took place within senior World Championships for different events, but a year later the second fully independent Junior World Championships took place at Changwon.
The Championships involve a variety of both Olympic and non-Olympic events in rifle, pistol and shotgun, with individual and team events.
The ISSF defines a “junior” as an athlete under the age of 21 on December 31 of the competition year.[
India topped the medals table in Lima three years ago. In Changwon last year China won most medals – 28, including 12 golds - with India second on 17, including six golds, followed by Ukraine and Kazakhstan on 10.
This year, however, India appears poised to resume its pre-eminence as it fields 60 athletes in Lima - ten times as many as China.
The United States is fielding 40 athletes including the 19-year-old defending skeet men champion Ben Keller, who recently won the national junior title and is seeking a third consecutive world title, and 2023 trap women gold medallist Ryann Phillips.
The American team also includes 20-year-old Jordan Sapp, who broke a Qualification World Record Junior that had stood for more than a decade in July in scoring a perfect 125 at the ISSF Junior World Cup Shotgun in Porpetto, Italy – an event where Keller took gold.
AIN athletes from Russia number 29, with Ukraine and Germany bringing 27 athletes.
Italy fields a team of 26 that includes defending trap men champion Matteo Dambrosi.
He will face stern opposition in the form of Spain’s 20-year-old Andres Garcia, who finished 22nd at the Paris 2024 Games and who already has a world junior gold from the 2021 Lima edition as well as silver from last year.
The women’s 50m rifle 3 positions will see Switzerland’s 18-year-old Vivien Jaeggi defend her title against a field that will include last year’s bronze medallist – her 15-year-old sister Emely, who was eligible to have been chosen for the Paris 2024 Games, which would have made her the youngest ever competitor in Olympic shooting sport, after a superb season.
Jaeggi junior earned bronze in Cairo in what was her debut ISSF World Cup appearance and then put herself into a position to make history by winning one of the two women’s Olympic Quota places on offer at the Final Olympic qualifier in Rio de Janeiro on April 20, when she earned silver.
The young Swiss competitor underlined her potential by taking bronze at the European Championships before equalling the qualifying world record of 596, also a world junior record, at the Munich World Cup.
However, she was not selected for the Paris 2024 Olympics, at which her compatriot Chiara Leone won the 50m rifle 3 positions title that had been won by Switzerland’s Nina Christen in Tokyo three years earlier.
Slovakia’s Miroslava Hockova will defend her skeet women title.
Meanwhile Sweden has been able to select a senior world champion for its team – 21-year-old Victor Lindgren, who will contest the 10m air rifle and 50m rifle 3 positions.