FEATURE New Competition- New Concept Glengary, West Virginia- As the fog blew across the top of the West Virginia hills at the Peacemaker National Training Center yesterday morning and afternoon, it carried snatches of conversations between groups of one of the largest gatherings of champion shooters ever at a single competition. Those conversations didnt sound like the normal exchanges of information between top-level shooters. Instead, they sounded more like the nervous chatter between shooters closer to average than excellent. Thats because the champions shooters gathered here this week are competing for the title of World Shooting Champion - in no discipline stipulated. This winner will have shown proficiency at the equivalent of a very long buffet line of shooting disciplines. Bullseye, precision smallbore rifle, F-1, Steel Challenge, Sporting Clays, Bianchi Cup and even End of Trail all have representative stages here. If youre comfortable shooting everything, youll be right in your element here. But champions are best known for their abilities to specialize, so these top-tier specialists are concentrating on the basics for disciplines many say they have never seriously considered shooting in competition. The champion of this event will stake a legitimate claim to what might more accurately be called the shooting equivalent of rodeos all around cowboy by proving that over four days of competition, they were the equal of a collection of world class shooters in each of the stages. And thats where the collection of very good shooters entered who have never won a world title in anything may be the sleepers in the competition. Should they get hot they might bring home a $50,000 payday-without having won a single stage. One world champion shared some wisdom shared with him by two Olympic shooters. A shotgun competitor told him dont even look at the sights, just look at the bird, mount the gun, yank the trigger as quickly as you can and break the clay. His Olympic bullseye advice was equally straightforward: only look at your front sight and squeeze the trigger - every time - dont even think about the gun going off. Smilingly he admitted, the net result was...confusion. One says yank while the other says squeeze. Look at the sights, dont look at the sights. I dunno.... Watching Match Director Larry Houck run from stage to stage as range officers and volunteers ironed out the kinks, I began to get a sense of the enormity of staging an ambitious match like this one. Any match has gotta run like a construction project, he huffed, there have to be landmarks along the process. People have to know theyre accountable all along the way. And, he added, no matter how hard you work, its still going to be right down-to-the-wire because its a big thing- lots of moving parts. You have to be able to manage and keep going. Yesterday, Houcks managing included listening to a complaint about a problem at the 500-yard F1 rifle stage. One shooter insisted his rifle and scope combination just wasnt right - despite the fact the shooter just before him had come within two points of firing a perfect score. At that point, Houck patiently explained the purpose of the four sighting rounds: to allow each shooter to see where the x-ring was on the scope for you - so you know where to hold on the scored shots. Thats critically important because no shooter will ever fire one of their own guns. Every gun is a stage gun -identical guns shooting identical ammo- at every position on each stage. And the only allowed adjustments to pre-zeroed scopes are diopters and parallax adjustments. After looking over the guns, optics, ammo and range on the F1 stage, Jerry Miculek said he had a strategy -and he shared it. He was just going to shoot his sighting rounds and watch the flag in front of the targets. If a shot was a great one, he was going to slow down and wait until the flag was as close as possible to that same spot before taking his next shot. If that sounds a lot like the advice a parent, grandparent or good friend shared when you were learning to shoot as a child, youre probably a pretty good long-range shooter. There are more than a few of them here in Glengary this week- if you can, you should get out and see them for yourself. --Jim Shepherd
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:49:52 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015