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From The Independent Newspaper – Pistols at dawn as Britain’s top gun misses Olympic target
From The Independent Newspaper – Pistols at dawn as Britain’s top gun misses Olympic target
Britain’s top marksman, Mick Gault, who came out of retirement to take a pot shot at an Olympic place this summer, looks likely to miss his target on a technicality, despite the concern of the former sports minister, Kate Hoey, who is president of British Shooting.
Record-breaker Gault, 58, awarded the OBE after becoming the nation’s most prolific Commonwealth Games competitor in any sport – 17 medals including nine golds – achieved a qualifying score for the free pistol but has now been told that the only host nation quota place available is for the air pistol, for which he does not have the required mark. Yet, as he points out, the irony is that should he be selected for Team GB, under Olympic rules he would be permitted to shoot in both categories.
Even though Hoey, one of his greatest admirers, has made representations on his behalf, British Shooting will be sending only one pistol shooter to London, 27-year-old Georgina Geikie, a part-time Devon barmaid who is known as Britain’s Lara Croft for her prowess with the 25 metres sport target pistol. Says Gault, a civil servant with the RAF in Norfolk: ‘’I am disappointed and gobsmacked that we apparently are returning several host nation places, which seems a shame for myself and other British shooters.’’
British Shooting say: “This is nothing personal. We don’t have a home quota place in free pistol, only air
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pistol. As no one has achieved a qualifying mark in that event we have asked the British Olympic Association if we can change that place for one in a discipline where we have achieved it, like rifle or trap shooting. It seems only fair to allow someone who has the qualifying criteria to compete.”
Shame though, that someone of Gault’s calibre has to bite the bullet.
Target Shooter says: We thank The Independent for highlighting yet another blow for GB shooting – but are we really surprised? British shooters have been treated shamelessly by both governments for the last twenty-odd years. It would be too embarrassing for Britain to win a pistol-shooting medal!
The Olympic games will see hundreds of shooters from overseas converge on London with their rifles, pistols and shotguns. Does anyone in Parliament REALLY BELIEVE that British citizens – sorry, ‘subjects’ are less fit than the rest of the FREE world to be trusted with pistols?
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