Tragic! Hungarian shooting champion Diana Igaly dies at 56

Photo: www.facebook.com/Hungarian Shooting Federation

Hungarian skeet shooter Diána Igaly, an Olympic champion in Athens in 2004, has died at age 56 from complications related to the coronavirus, the Hungarian Shooting Association said on Friday.

Hungary is currently grappling with the world’s deadliest surge of the COVID-19 pandemic – the highest weekly number of deaths per capita for nearly three weeks, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Igaly, who also won four World Championships and six European championships and amassed 32 international medals in total, had been hospitalised on Tuesday.

“She was a legend of the sport,” the central European country’s shooting association said in a statement.

She was born into a shooting family. Her father was left off the Olympic shooting team in 1976 for political reasons, when Hungary was under Communist rule. He subsequently became her coach and developed a shooting style that made Igaly one of the fastest in the field.

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Photo: MTI/Földi Imre

Igaly competed in international events teaming up with her mother – who took over her training after her father’s death in 1997 – and won her first major international title at age 25.

She participated in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, when women competed in a single field against men, then took home bronze from the first Olympics where men and women competed separately, the 2000 Sydney Games.

In Athens, Igaly missed just three of 100 shots, hitting all 25 of her targets in the semi-final and final rounds, en route to becoming the first Hungarian woman to win an Olympic shooting gold.