'Let my shooting do the talking': Number-one ranked Smith eyeing Olympics

The 28-year-old, who competed at the delayed 2020 Tokyo games, finished her 2023 campaign in November as the number one women's trap shooter in the world for the first time.

Smith will return to training in the next week before selection for just two women's spots heats up for the games which are scheduled for July and August.

On January 12-13 she has back-to-back matches in Belmont, Queensland and then a three-week gap before a match in Sydney, followed by a match in Melbourne a fortnight later.

Smith refused to look too far ahead when addressing her selection chances.

"You never know what's going to happen," she said.

"The competition's going to be hotly contested so I'm just going to have to bring my best performance forward and let my shooting do the talking and see what plays out.

"There'll be two international matches back to back which count for our selection and then there'll be one and two go.

"So it'll be a pretty hectic first six months, a lot of time, a lot of pressure and a lot of training but we'll just work our way through it."

Smith's 2023 season featured an equal women's world record when she shot a perfect score at the Yarra Valley Grand Prix in February and a gold medal at the International Shooting Sport Federation World Cup in Qatar in March which earned her the number one ranking.

A month later she won bronze at the Cyprus ISSF World Cup.

The Camperdown-based shooter finished the year with a ninth-placed finish at November's 2023 ISSF World Cup final in Qatar but wasn't too disheartened.

"I finished ninth but it's been a big season and obviously I still capped off my year with world number one," she said.

"So that was a really big achievement and something that I was really proud of so that was probably the highlight of my 2023."

Smith, who placed sixth in both the women's trap and mixed trap events at Tokyo in 2021, would relish another Olympic opportunity.

"Being such a short cycle from Tokyo it was a no-brainer to keep pushing for Paris and it'd be really nice to go to a second Olympics," she said.

"Obviously Tokyo was heavily in COVID (protocols) so there were a lot of restrictions and a lot of things that we probably didn't get to experience at a full games.

"The shooting is about three hours out of Paris, so we'll be in a mobile village too so that's going to have its own challenges as well but we've got to get through the selection first and see what happens after that."