Nathan Hales was the coolest man in the scorching Paris heat as the Team GB shooting star clinched gold - and an Olympic record - on his debut, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

They used live pigeons for some of the shooting events when Paris hosted the Olympics in 1900. Those poor birds at least had the good fortune to avoid the era of Nathan Hales.

Across 50 minutes on Tuesday, this 28-year-old son of Kent was the coolest man in France. An assassin without a pulse. A slayer of clays, a breaker of records and, ultimately, the wearer of a pristine gold medal on the very top step of the podium.

We might not always understand the nuances of what we see when the Games roll around, but excellence has a way of standing out like an exploding red disk. 

On a scorching day two hours south of Paris, Hales and his Beretta DT11 shotgun had demolished more of them than any man in Olympic history on his way to winning the trap final.

It was only when he took down his 48th of the 50 launched around him that he allowed himself so much as a smile.

‘I'm so happy to get an Olympic record as well as winning the Olympics,’ he said.

‘Being in this position is something I have dreamed of since I was a kid, since I started shooting with my family. It was always was a dream of mine, so to be able to come here and actually see it through to the end is absolutely unreal. 

‘I just try and keep everything as we always do and treat it exactly the same way I treat finals in training. I just push through and keep focused on what I'm doing, not on what other athletes are doing.’

Had he looked across at any point, he would have seen a procession of shattered spirits as, one by one, five men fell in their pursuit of his pace, the last being Qi Ying of China. 

Where they missed, where they felt the crush of the occasion and the sweat of a 35-degree afternoon on their hands, Hales just kept to his routine of shooting, hitting, reloading, shooting, hitting, reloading. Over and again until the grass of the Chateauroux Shooting Centre was coated in red dust.

Prior to these Games, the Olympic record was 43. Qi managed 44 and was level through 33 targets, so we can’t say this was gift wrapped in any sense. But Hales, even without a global individual title to his name, is a big beast on this stage. His world record of 49, set a year ago almost to the week, told us laymen that much.

Here, on his Olympic debut, he showed those talents could translate in moments of greatest pressure and he did so before the kind of audience that is alien to his sport for all but a couple of hours out of each four-year cycle.

At one stage, he had reason to be nervous when he missed with his 32nd shot – only his second error of the final. That allowed Qi to move level, but where Hales grew, his rival shrank in the face of opportunity. He missed two of his next three and Hales reeled off his final 18 in succession.

‘It is absolutely amazing to be on BBC, I'm so happy people at home could experience it,’ he said, having marked the moment of victory by simply cracking open the barrel of his shotgun and gently puffing out his cheeks. 

‘I knew I had a couple of targets buffer so that was a great comfort but I try not to think about that and it didn't result in any misses. It's a fine line and one that's easy to fall over.’

On the greatest day of his career, falling never seemed like an option.