Nino Salukvadze, the 55-year-old athlete had secured a quota spot for Georgia in the women's 25m pistol event at the 2023 European Games in Wroclaw, Poland, on June 26 and has now qualified for the Paris 2024 games. With this, she becomes the first athlete in the history of Olympic games to qualify for the10th consecutive Olympics. Salukvadze, born in February 1969, is a Georgian Sports shooter and a nine-time Olympian who has won medals on three occasions. At the age of 19 and while competing for the Soviet Union at the 1988 Summer Olympics, she won a gold medal in the women's 25-metre sporting pistol competition.
Following the previous consistently maintained accomplishments and reaching the gold medal final was enough for the nine-time Olympian to punch a ticket for Paris 2024 as Greece, Bulgaria and Germany had already secured a spot for the next Games.
Salukvadze, who is currently the top-ranked Georgian 25m pistol shooter in the ISSF Olympic qualification rankings, would become the first athlete in history to qualify for a 10th consecutive Olympics, equalling the overall participation record set by Canadian equestrian jumper Ian Millar in 2012. She is already the woman with most Olympic appearances (nine), after qualifying for Tokyo 2020.
Nino Salukvadze Writes Olympic History
In Salukvadze's career spanning almost 40 years, she has won every title in the sport. After her Olympic debut for the former Soviet Union at Seoul in 1988 followed by the victorious women's 25m Pistol gold and 10m Air Pistol silver. Twenty years later in Beijing, the shooter Nino had clinched bronze for Georgia in the 10m Air Pistol event by grabbing headlines throughout for embracing her Russian rival Natalia Paderina at a time when the two countries were at adversities and raging war.
Moreover, Salukvadze also stood atop the podium at the World and European Championships, as well as in the World Cup Finals. Her most recent achievement came at the ISSF Grand Prix in Osijek, Croatia, earlier this year in January 2024.
Salukvadze revealed in an interview with Olympics.com that she was quite 'optimistic' about her chances to qualify and explained that her father Vakhtang and her son Tsotne had convinced her to go for the tenth Games. Adding to it, she also said, “It’s not important for me, it’s important for my country. Georgia is really small and 80% of the world's population doesn’t know where it is. So maybe if I achieve this, they will know about my small paradise country.”
For the three-time Olympic medallist, age doesn’t mean anything in shooting and she doesn't want to think about it.
It is believed that our sport is 80 percent psychological, and all we need to do is be able to control our thoughts mentally through it. Salukvadze's persistence defines her and reminds all the women around the world to always keep pursuing their dreams that are limitless.
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