Bengaluru: Turkey’s silver-haired shooter Yusuf Dikec has spawned a sea of memes by just showing up like he would at any competition. Regular t-shirt, prescription glasses, and his 4.5 mm calibre air gun. No optical aids or blinders. Like a hitman had been pulled out from the crowd and into the firing lane.

“I never needed any special equipment. My friends also ask me about it. Even other professional shooters ask me about it and I tell them that I am just a natural, a natural shooter,” the 51-year-old reportedly told Turkish media.

It’s not without reason. Dikec, who took up the sport in 2001, is a product of Turkey’s military school of Gendarmerie. He’s won five medals at the ISSF World Championships – one of them gold, back in 2014 in the 25m centre fire pistol event. He has participated in every Olympic Games since 2008 and it’s only in his fifth appearance, in Paris that a historic medal has come his way.

Dikec won the silver with his teammate Sevval Ilayda Tarhan in the 10m air pistol mixed event (yes, the event in which Manu Bhaker-Sarabjot Singh won a bronze). It’s Turkey’s first-ever Olympic medal in shooting.

“In Los Angeles (2028 Olympics), hopefully it’s a gold,” Dikec reportedly said after. The shooter from Turkey having his hand tucked in his pocket during the competition appears to have gotten attached to his nonchalance. It’s more to do with physics. Pistol shooters tend to anchor their non-shooting hand in their pocket for purposes of balance and steadiness.

Dikec is seen at the 2011 World Cup in Munich being just as effortless, and with just as minimal gear on him. In a sky blue polo t-shirt and no glasses he shot 687.3 for a gold medal finish.

Dikec has been trending on social media in Japan as ‘free user Ojisan’ (Japanese for uncle, middle-aged gentleman), comparing him shooting without fancy gear at an Olympics for a medal to F2P gamers who win.

The pommel horse guy

Stephen Nedoroscik sat with his eyes closed in his thick glasses, leaning back, waiting for his turn. When it arrived three hours later, he whipped off his glasses and did a Clark Kent-turn on the pommel horse – considered the toughest apparatus to nail in men’s gymnastics.

Hips swivelling, legs in perpetual motion – handstands, splayed in scissors. Nedoroscik did it all in a fluid, near-perfect routine, to score 14.866, taking the USA men’s gymnastics team to a bronze.

“I worked my whole life up to those 45 seconds,” he said after. The team’s first Olympic medal in 16 years.

The adorably nerdy, mild-mannered, rubik’s cube-solving guy who declared that he’s “representing everyone who wears glasses well,” has people in his country and everyone else watching the Olympics hooked.

This is the first Olympics for the 25-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts (his grandparents are from Slovakia), who has strabismus, or crossed eyes. “I don’t even really see when I’m doing gymnastics,” Nedoroscik said, on doing his Olympic routine without his glasses, on the show ‘Today’. “It’s all in the hands. I can feel everything.”

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