This is Vitalina Batsarashkina, a 19 year-old Russian shooter — and big fan of The Witcher, it seems — who won a silver medal at the Olympics earlier this week in the 10m Air Pistol.
Image: Getty
Pictured above is a close-up of the shooting glasses she wore during the event, featuring a sketch of a Witcher medallion. And just in case you think “well, that could just be any wolf”, look here:
Image: Getty
There was an actual Witcher medallion hanging from her pants during the event.
If anyone on Earth is going to be happier with silver than gold, it’s going to be a Witcher fan.
And while we’re admiring her shooting gear, there’s a nice shout-out to American McGee’s Alice on the glasses as well.
Comments
10 responses to “The Witcher Makes Surprise Olympics Appearance On An Athlete’s Uniform”
Great picture with the hand in the pocket and the cool looking gun…she just needs to turn it sideways and go gangsta wild with it.
She is Russian, and a fan of The Witcher, a series where the main character is an alchemist. I feel like there is a big ‘drug cheat’ joke to be made here somewhere. But I won’t, innocent until proven guilty, and she was cleared to compete. Great for her to make it there legitimately.
Happy to see a 19 year-old Witcher fan winning an Olympic medal, whatever the recent sporting reputation of the nation she represents.
Dose of white honey and there’s nothing WADA can do about it is there
How, exactly, would one use drugs to shoot more accurately?
Well in Metal Gear Solid you could use Diazepam (AKA Valium) to lower your heart rate and steady your aim, one can assume that it would probably provide a competitive advantage in real life also.
Maybe she played MGS and is using Diazepam (or equivalent)
Beta-blockers, which can control heart rhythm and blood pressure, so one can hold their body more still and aim more accurately.
But I’ll say it again, she was cleared, so I won’t go making jokes about it. Even though I just kind of did so in my original post, I feel the term ‘drug cheat’ gets thrown around too loosely these days. I know there are many times where it can be said conclusively, such as Lance Armstrong, but in cases such as Maria Sharapova, where Meldonium’s status as a performance enhancer is debatable, people can be too quick to judge.
Man, in retrospect my response came off as really snarky, but I was actually just interested! Thanks for explaining.
No worries at all! It seemed like a straight question, so I tried to answer it straight. Reading my response in retrospect, I might have also came off snarky in that second paragraph of mine though, when I was just elaborating on my thoughts on this some more. The problem with the internet, hard to tell the tone in words sometimes.
beta – blockers