Olympics
Vancouver trap shooter bids tearful farewell

By Blaine Newnham
Seattle Times associate editor

DEAN RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES Lisa Bade puts a comforting arm around husband, Lance, as they watch the medal ceremonies. Bade, of Vancouver, Wash., placed fifth.

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ATHENS — Lance Bade didn't cry until he saw his wife crying. They held each other as the Olympic medal presentation for trap shooting went on without him.

"It's disappointing, man," Bade said. "I pride myself on being a finals shooter."

Bade — who is from Vancouver, Wash., and had won a bronze in 1996 — was clearly devastated, both by how he lost a medal and what it would mean to him and his family.

"We were going to buy a house," said Bade, his voice lost in loudspeaker Greek music.

But these were the Olympic Games, the pinnacle of the shooting world. His father, Lance Sr., said a silver medal would have been worth $25,000 from both the Italian company that supplies him guns and the one that supplies him shells. The U.S. Olympic Committee also gives each gold medalist $25,000, another $15,000 going for the silver medal and $10,000 for the bronze medalist.

To someone who has a failing landscape business, these are not insignificant numbers.

"It is what makes it so hard," the 33-year-old Bade said. "You love the sport, you give up everything for it, and then you have a rough day when you need it most."

On a hot and windy day in Greece, Bade was poised for his finest hour, gaining a medal that would get the strong U.S. shooting team off to a productive start while validating his decision to put aside his landscape business to concentrate on shooting. He said you couldn't make money in business unless it got your full attention, and his full attention was on shooting his shotgun.

He had been tied for second with Italy's Giovanni Pellielo, two points behind Russian Alexei Alipov, who missed only once in 150 rounds to win the gold medal.

"My fate was left up to me," Bade said. "If I shoot 24 or better (out of 25) in the final, I am guaranteed a medal. I mean, I'm breaking 24s in my sleep."

In the contest for the silver medal, Pellielo faltered first, missing his eighth shot in the final round of 25. Bade was in second alone, but he missed, too.

"The way it looks," he said, "I choked all over the place. The guy next to me misses, and then I do, too. The timing was bad; the bird comes out low, and I shoot over the top of it."

The worst was yet to come. Bade missed three of his final eight shots, slipping all the way to fifth, and was unable to explain what had happened.

"Maybe it had something to do with the way I was holding my eyes and focusing on the birds," he said. "I probably got jumpy. I wasn't nervous, I'd beat all these guys before, and they'd beaten me."

There is nothing pretentious about Bade. He drives a pickup, has a tattoo on his leg and shoots wearing shorts.

Bade shoots, as his dad says, "because the hunting season doesn't last long enough."

When he was 15, he and his dad took their new hunting dog to a shooting range in Vancouver so the dog could get accustomed to the noise of guns.

It was music to young Lance. A few weeks later, he was hooked on shooting clay pigeons. In the Olympics, they come from 15 different machines, at all angles and at heights varying between 5 feet and 13 feet. Bade was always good at it.

He won a junior championship in Spokane and eventually moved to Colorado Springs, where shooters train for the Olympics.

"I left home with no skills and not knowing anybody," he said. "There was no apartment for me in Colorado Springs when I got there, but I'd saved money from working in a glass plant in Vancouver and got by on $50 a month. There was no money for hunting or fishing, just shooting, carpooling to the range and eating frozen pizzas."

It was about that time that Bade's father was stricken with cancer and lost a kidney.

Yesterday, his dad came out of the stands to console him. As did his wife and two sisters. "It ain't nothing," he said to one of them.

You knew it was.

Blaine Newnham: 206-464-2364 or bnewnham@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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