It served Adams so well that in 2002, in his sixth successive appearance for Australia at the Commonwealth Games, he set the record for the most medals won in any sport.

The record, 18 medals, was equalled by another shooter, Mick Gault of England, at the Glasgow 2014 Games but has never been beaten.

"When you're training you feel comfortable, but when there are medals at stake your pulse rate might be 150 to 200, and you want to get it down to 75," said Adams, who won seven golds.

"Bringing it back is the hard thing to learn. To the audience you might appear calm, but inside you're not really.

"I always tried to focus on one aspect at a time - there's mechanical, equipment, physical and mental. At the start, the physical part is most important, being able to hold a gun steadily for a couple of hours.

"As you go higher up the scale it becomes more mental, though overall it's a blend.

"When you're training you feel comfortable, your arousal level reaches a certain point at which you are at your best. You've got to find where that point is, and when you're there, remain calm."

Adams had the rare distinction, in Manchester, of competing after he had tested positive for a banned substance. "That was a very strange case," he said.

An out-of-competition urine sample taken a month before the Games showed the presence of a diuretic, which can be used to mask anabolic steroids.

The diuretic was present in a drug that Adams had long been taking for high blood pressure, and he was cleared to compete by the national and global governing bodies of shooting.

That drug, Avapro, was available in two forms, one legal and one not.

Adams, then 57, was taking the "wrong" one, and had been doing so for two years.

He and his doctor who prescribed it were unaware of the problem, while team officials thought he was on the "right" form of Avapro.

After the Games, Adams was banned for two years by the Australian Olympic Committee, but he won an appeal and had the ban reduced to four weeks.

Adams, who retired from competition after those 2002 Games, is a farmer from Forbes in New South Wales, about 250 miles from Sydney.

After becoming an expert in goat rearing, he travelled the world selling goats, and his own expertise, most profitably in Asia.

He first used a gun in the army cadets at school and took up pistol shooting when a new club was formed in Forbes in 1973.

Within five years he was competing at the World Championships, and he made his debut at the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane in 1982, aged 37.

When Adams started his record-breaking shooting career in Brisbane, one of the sport's more colourful characters was making his exit.

Lord Swansea, a gold medallist for Wales in 1966, was a landowner, like Adams, though he did not have to work hard for it. He was descended from a baronet, inherited an estate of 11,000 acres, and was educated at Eton and Cambridge.

He became one of Britain's foremost freemasons and was an outspoken critic of new gun laws introduced after mass shootings by deranged gunmen in England and Scotland. 

"You cannot legislate for nutters," he famously said.