Lajos Pálinkás

Career Having started the sport since the age of thirteen, Pálinkás has been training throughout his shooting career under coach Mihály Tesánszky for the national team at Zámolyi Shooting Range on the outskirts of the nation's capital Budapest.

Pálinkás competed internationally for Hungary at the age of twenty-five, and simultaneously pocketed his first medal with a bronze in rapid fire shooting at the 1989 European Championships in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Three years later, Pálinkás made his first Hungarian team at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, finishing twenty-second in the rapid fire pistol with 579 points.

On his second Olympic appearance at Atlanta 1996, Pálinkás upgraded from his four-year fresh Olympic feat in Barcelona to successfully grab the eighth and last seed for his first Olympic final in the rapid fire pistol with a qualifying score of 586. Battling against the most experienced shooters in the finale, Pálinkás came up with a steady aim to shoot a substantial 99.9 for a seventh-place finish at 685.9, just five points away from the Olympic medal haul.

In 1999, Pálinkás reached the peak of his career on the international stage, as he claimed his first individual gold medal at the ISSF World Cup meet in Seoul, South Korea with 692.7 points. Five days later, on 21 September, Pálinkás sought to repeat his Olympic finale bid from Atlanta in the 25 m rapid fire pistol, but fell out of his contention to fourteenth with a qualifying score of 579, dropping five points from the final cutoff.

Three years later, Pálinkás bounced back from a disastrous Olympic feat in Sydney to nail the fourth position, his best career result after fourteen years, at the European Championships in Plzeň, Czech Republic with 687.8, just one point short of the bronze medal won by Germany's Klaus-Dieter Schmidt. Pálinkás got off to a bristling start with a perfect 100 on his initial try, until he aimed a rapid, four-second shot poorly at the very end of the first stage that saw him stumble down the leaderboard with a relatively low mark. He followed his miserable first day score of 287 with a much improved 290 on the remaining half of the competition, but his tally of 577 points was not enough to put him through to the final, forcing him in a two-way tie with Switzerland's Niki Marty for the twelfth position.

Olympic results