Trap shooter Susan Nattrass is heading to Athens to compete in her fifth Olympics. (File photo)

They're so old, they just missed being around for the first Athens Olympics. Well, the modern-day ones.

He's 57. She's 53.

They keep going and going and going ...

"I'm definitely the oldest in my competition," trap shooter Susan Nattrass said. "Whitney Lopez of the United States is 17. I'm older than both her parents."

Edmonton's Nattrass is heading for her fifth Olympics. No big deal. Ian Millar is entering his eighth. Nine if you count making the team for Moscow in 1980 when Canada joined the U.S.-led boycott.

"I've never thought about age," Millar said. "If you're a gymnastics competitor, maybe your moment is when you're 14. When you're in equestrian, it tends to come later."

Two other Canadians are about to compete in their fifth Olympics: Vancouver sailor Ross MacDonald, 39, and Montreal paddler Caroline Brunet, 35.

Six Canadians will be in their fourth Olympics: Edmonton race walker Tim Barrett, 39; Victoria sailor Richard Clarke 36; Edmonton kayaker David Ford 37; Dartmouth paddler Steven Giles, 32; Victoria cyclist Alison Sydor, 37; and our flag-bearer, Montreal judo competitor Nicholas Gill, 32.

That's 10 members of the Canadian team with a combined total of 47 Olympics.

But none of them have stories like the 50-something pair of oldies but goodies.

NATTRASS IN THROUGH QUOTA

When we last left Nattrass and Millar in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, at the Pan-Am Games, both their dreams of making it to another Olympics appeared to have blown up in their faces. Yet they're both off to Athens.

What happened to Nattrass at the Pan- Ams was enough to make a grown lady cry.

"It breaks my heart," she said, breaking down in tears to this writer when one of the most incredible careers in Canadian international sport looked as if it had come to an end because of a busted gun.

"I didn't want to go out like this. I wanted to go out at the Olympics. This is the most heartbreaking day of my entire career. This is the first time in 34 years of shooting I've ever had such a disaster."

Nattrass not only had broken the barrier to shoot with the men in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal but has been credited by her competitors for leading the movement to get women's trap as an event in the five-ring circus.

All's well that ends well.

A comment by the secretary general of the International Shooting Federation encouraged Nattrass to check out a situation she didn't realize existed.

"There was a wild-card spot, a hardship-case sort of position available if Canada had a quota spot available.

"As it turned out, Canada had earned three more quota spots than the Canadian Olympic Committee was going to use because of the new top-12 criteria. The COC was encouraged to keep one of the quota spots back to let me do an appeal. When I won the appeal, I was ecstatic."

Nattrass is headed to Athens hoping to prove it was the right move.

"I want to prove it to everybody," she said. "I want to show they were right, that I deserve it. Right now I'm probably ranked about seventh or eighth in the world. On a good day I can win a medal."

Millar, who hopes to compete in a 10th Pan-Am Games when he's 60 and do it with his son, Johnathan, and daughter, Amy, wasn't in tears like Nattrass when he fell short of qualifying for the Olympics in Santo Domingo.

"I can't tell you how very, very disappointing not going to the Olympics is for me and everybody else on the team," Millar said when I talked to him that day, exactly one year before Day 1 of the Athens Olympics.

In a telephone interview from the Netherlands yesterday he said it's a strange feeling being in Valkenswaar preparing for an Olympics by himself.

MILLAR COMPETING INDIVIDUALLY

"I very, very much enjoy the team competition and for the first time I'm going to the Olympics without the Canadian team. It's not going to be the same. We have to get Canada back in the team competition at the next Olympics."

Millar was selected to represent Canada in the individual competition off events earlier this year.

"It's very much a horse-rider combination from competitions starting in January in Florida and California," he said.

"I think I'd be ranked in the top 10 going in."

Nattrass says making it to five Olympics along with paddler Brunet and sailor MacDonald is special because it's a short list.

Sailor Evert Bastet and equestrians James Elder and Christilot Hanson-Boylen each competed in seven Olympics, shooter John Primrose and rower Lesley Thompson six. Making it to five were shooters George Leary and Gil Boa, wrestler Doug Yeats, runner Charmaine Crooks, racewalker Alex Oakley and shooter Jules Sobrian.

"Five is an Olympic Games for every Olympic ring," Nattrass said.