IPSC World Handgun Shoot is this month in South Africa
We have a team of 20 traveling over to do our best against the worlds best. IPSC is shot in 106 countries around the world.
The cool thing is that all those different countries come together to compete in a shooting sport that’s a real test in marksmanship and a race against the clock as much as against each other. The funny part is when some fool tries to say it’s not a real sport because it’s not in the Olympic or Commonwealth games, it’s done to try and discredit us, but as far as I know neither is Rugby Union, so let’s see them go along to an All Black match and tell people it’s not a sport. That would make interesting viewing.
There has been a lot of work and some serious money spent in getting ourselves ready for this trip and match.
For the majority of the team this is their first Worlds and for some even their first big overseas event. It’s going to be a bit of an eye opener; we get about 200 competitors at our Nationals but the Worlds have between 1600 and 1800 competing. The official opening has a walk in like the Olympics, it’s an honour to represent our country and to be amongst the best in the world.
Some competitors are professionals and all they do is shoot training or train others. For myself it’s a serious hobby bordering on an obsession if you asked my wife, or even most of my friends but they aren’t any better so just don’t ask.
Each day we will be shooting 6 stages in 3 hours, over 6 days , so a total of 30 stages with a day off or lay day somewhere in the week. So we are going to be on the go.
This means our gear needs to work flawlessly, but that’s normal, as even the smallest miss step is expensive and we will drop a lot of points and places.
A disqualification is final so a bit like a red card, the game is over, which means you just get to watch and all your scores up until then are gone. Because of this, gun handling is very important as well as knowing just how far you can push it, whilst still being in full control and total awareness of your position and angles as you travel through the course of fire.
There will be 36 different stages, the sizes differ from small under 13 and large up to 32. All of them are new and unseen, this provides all kinds of challenges. But that’s the fun part. We get 2 minutes to look through each stage first and then we have one go to get it right, no second chances, muck it up and tough luck, better luck on the next stage.
We are also shooting in 4 man teams so we need to work as a team because the 3 best scores will be added together for the team points.
The open gun team will be shooting with the German team, so let the games begin.
