When Richard Faulds walked into a shooting school in Paddock Wood, Kent, after clinching double-trap gold at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, he ignored the approaches of the gawky teenager employed by the club as a groundsman and maintenance worker. Straight out of school, where he had not excelled, Steve Scott caught the shooting bug as a child, carrying cartridges for his father; now he will line up with Faulds in Beijing.

Both are serious medal contenders, but close observers are backing the 23-year-old, who was crowned European champion in Nicosia, Cyprus, this month, to pip his more experienced team-mate to the gold medal.

The two are polar opposites. Faulds, 31, is a devoted family man with an eight-month-old son, Charlie, in tow. He grew up on his parents' stud farm, has been appointed CBE and is a veteran of three Olympics. Scott, who babbles excitably in scattergun sentences, is one of seven children. He left school at 16, drives a Vauxhall Astra and, before he was taken on as a potential Olympian, he made ends meet by working the evening shift at a B&Q store in Bexhill, East Sussex.

Thrown together by their aptitude with a shotgun - both can blast a pair of clay pigeons out of the sky within 0.6sec of the discs being flung from the trap - the unlikely duo are firm friends. “I first met Richard when I was working at West Kent Shooting School and he came across as quite arrogant,” Scott said. “But obviously he can't say hello and be friendly to everyone and to go from someone where he wouldn't even say hello to me in the first place to actually quite close friends is a big difference.”

As the two lined up on a wet weekday afternoon at the National Shooting Centre in Bisley, Surrey, to show off their skills, they barely exchanged a word. “Off range we have a laugh and a joke,” Faulds said. “But we're always very competitive when we're on the road, when we're training and when we're at a competition.

“When you're competing you're out there for yourself and Steve would say exactly the same. It's not a team sport. At the Olympics you do your own thing, to do what you can for yourself, and Steve's as much a competitor as a mate.”

Faulds shot to prominence at 19, when he reached the final of the double trap at the event's first Olympic outing, in Atlanta in 1996. After being crowned champion in Sydney, he unexpectedly failed to reach the final in Athens, finishing thirteenth.

Scott has been steadily climbing the rankings. A former world junior champion, he was victorious in the world and European team championships in 2003 and won individual bronze at the European Championships in 2007 before winning gold this year. He also travelled to the 2004 Olympics in Athens as an official reserve.

Ian Coley, who coaches both shooters, is confident that the young tyro will bring home a medal. “With the Olympics, that's a very special event that nobody can replicate,” he said. “I think that Steve will rise to the occasion.

“With Richard, yes he won the gold medal in 2000. I've seen him right through from when he was Steve's age. We've experienced the highs and the lows of it all the way through. We are going with a realistic chance for both of them. It's not a hope, it's a chance. They are two quite different persons, but both are winners and from my side of things, that's what I like to see.”

Scott's attendance on the circuit is made possible by a programme with B&Q that pays a full-time wage for working barely eight hours a week. As a customer service assistant, he was working 20 hours a week in the evening, to give him time to train, before getting wind of a scholarship run by the company.

“When I found out about the programme, I told them I was ranked No1 in the UK and was very promising, looking at the Olympics, and they jumped at the chance,” he said. “I walked up to the store manager and said: 'By the way, I did shooting.' He said: 'I'll see what we can do' and it all kicked off from there.”