Air rifle, in contrast, is contested indoors, with the qualification room holding the hush of a hospital waiting room. Contestants line up, as the women do this morning to vie for the first gold on offer at the Beijing Olympics, shooting 40 shots at a target 10 m away, each having 74 minutes to finish the task at her own pace. Spectators (mostly mediapersons) are seated behind them on high-school-gym-style bleachers, squinting at the screen to track scores.

As it turns out, Anjali Bhagwat and Avneet Kaur Sidhu don’t make the top eight to get into the finals. Bhagwat had, for a few minutes, been in eighth place, but eventually her score of 393 (that is, seven misses) just doesn’t make the cut in a fray in which the Czech Republic’s Katerina Emmons gets a perfect 400, the lowest placed qualifier gets 397.

Du Li, local girl and defending champion, does though, placed fifth with 399.

It’s when the women move to the finals hall that you realise that to watch a shooting competition is to gain infinite opportunities to speculate about character and tactics, to give yourself license to read reason in the smallest of gestures.

In the finals, each contestant must take ten shots, with a maximum of 75 seconds allowed for each shot round. But here, all finalists take every shot together, and to subject them to cruelty and give the spectators delightfully sadistic pleasure, after a round of shots, each contestant’s score is called out by the announcer.

Du’s success had been taken for granted for very long. She’s had amazing success in the years before and after Athens at the world championships, and she was thought to have the advantage of competing at home as well as of the symbolic inevitability of starting China off to its projected finish this Games at the top of the medals heap. (Her eventual fifth-place finish was followed very soon after by news that Chinese weightlifter Chen Xiexia had won women’s gold in the 48 kg.)

China’s English language newspaper, China Daily, had asked this morning “Can Du?” The article harked back to an old quote from Du: “I really enjoy the final shot. It feels amazing.”

As it turned out, Du did not get in the last shots in each competition round. A bid to be the last to shoot was made each time by Emmons, who in the end set a new Olympic record (for a total score of 503.5).

The finals are a different shot-game from the qualifications. You can catch each contestant’s muscles stiffening, each one’s odd tics between rounds. And today one could see Emmons straining confidently to get the last shot in. Du was inevitably amongst the first four to shoot. And each time her middling scores of 9.8 and 10.1 drew sighs and tssks from the crowd. (Of course, there is no such thing as a middling score in shooting. You go below par on hitting the 0.5 mm diameter bull’s eye once too often, and there may not be a chance to make up.)

See what I mean about theorising? Shooting provides the space for amateurs like me to rationalise what more sensible folks would term a game of nerves and luck.

Tailpiece: The impulse to improvise, it appears, is rampant around the shooting ranges. Later in the day we watch Manavjit Singh Sandhu and Mansher Singh negotiate the first three rounds in trap qualification. (They place 12th and 21st respectively, with the last two rounds on Sunday.) Green hills provide a calming backdrop to the boom of ammunition, and up on the left sits a small, traditional structure.

What is it, we ask the volunteer, who as you will realise why pleads that he not be named. He mutters something about finding out, but returns with no information. What is it, we demand again, turning into typical tourists seeking the exotic in everyday structures, it must be a temple.

Why yes, it is, he smiles, let me tell you a story. There was a famous warrior, and it is a memorial to him... Then, he utters the give-away phrase, once upon a time. Instantly we know, and he concedes, that he is making it all up.