Ennio Mattarelli was an Italian competitive shooter who specialised in clay target shooting and who became one of the most significant figures in the history of his sport both through his competitive achievements and through his practical contribution to the sport’s equipment, being the founder of the Mattarelli clay target company that produced the coloured flying clay discs used in trap and skeet shooting competitions worldwide and whose standardised products helped establish the consistent competitive conditions that international clay target shooting requires. He died in 2026 at an advanced age.
He was born in Italy and came to clay target shooting through the sporting culture of the country, where shooting sports have a long tradition connected to both the rural hunting culture of the Italian countryside and to the organised competitive shooting that the Italian national federation has supported across the decades of the sport’s modern development. Clay target shooting, which developed in the late nineteenth century as a year-round training substitute for live pigeon shooting, became an Olympic sport with its inclusion in the 1900 Paris Games and has been part of the Olympic programme almost continuously since, with the trap and skeet disciplines providing the structured competitive framework for the sport at the highest international level.
His business contribution through the Mattarelli company addressed one of the fundamental requirements of clay target shooting competition: the standardised production of the clay targets themselves. A clay target, also called a clay pigeon despite having nothing to do with birds, is a disc typically 110 millimetres in diameter made of pitch and chalk, coloured orange or black to be visible against the sky or ground background of the shooting range, and designed to shatter when struck by a shotgun pellet pattern. The consistent quality and standardised dimensions of clay targets are essential to the fairness of competitive shooting, since variations in target size, weight, flight characteristics, or fragility could give different shooters different conditions and undermine the basis for comparing competitive performances across different events and venues.
The Mattarelli company’s production of clay targets that met the specifications required by international and national shooting federations contributed to the development of clay target shooting as a serious international competitive sport by ensuring that the equipment fundamental to the competition could be produced to consistent standards by a reliable supplier. The role of equipment manufacturers in the development of competitive sports is often underappreciated relative to the athletes who compete, but the availability of consistent, high-quality equipment is one of the preconditions for the fair competition that athletic achievement depends on.
He was honoured by the international clay target shooting community for both his competitive contributions and his business legacy, and his name became associated with the sport through the product that his company produced and that competitive shooters around the world used across the decades of international clay target competition. He died in 2026.