You won’t ever break a sweat. You can do it in skinny jeans and boat shoes. You’ll never hear of a pre-Varsity drinking ban. Yet it’s arguably the toughest sport you can take up at Oxford: unforgiving, mentally demanding, and offering immediate, unambiguous feedback on your performance.
If you’re up to the challenge – like the 30 teams of novices competing in the club’s annual Cuppers tournament in 4th week – pistol shooting might just be the sport for you.
A shooting sport is a competitive sport involving tests of proficiency (accuracy and speed) us- ing various types of guns, such as firearms and airguns. Hunting is also a shooting sport, and indeed shooting live pheasants was an Olympic event (albeit only once, in 1900).
Competitive pistol shooting combines focus, precision, and speed. While Cuppers is designed with complete beginners in mind, higher-level shooting requires disciplined and dedicated training. A number of the members of Oxford University Pistol Club take part in competitions which require 60 precision shots to be fired one after another – a test of concentration and mental stamina. Others specialize in aptly-named “Rapid Fire” competitions, in which they must hit the centres of five different targets in the space of four seconds.
Despite this, OUPC is welcoming to beginners – and most of its members have no experience of shooting before arriving at university. Because it is only mentally, rather than physically, taxing, the sport is open to people with disabilities, and, at university level, men and women compete together.
“It’s probably the most equal-opportunities sport there is,” says Josh More, a Chemistry DPhil student who has now been shooting for two and a half years. “The main factor is how well you cope with pressure. If you get stressed out in competition, you start trying too hard, and then you lose points. Ironically, the best way to shoot well is to go into every competition thinking, ‘I don’t care [about the score]. I literally just don’t care.’”
Because pistol shooting is scored individually and numerically, a shooter’s performance in competition is unambiguous and available for all to see. This is one of the factors that makes the pressure of shooting greater than that of other sports.
“It’s brutal because there’s nowhere to hide,” says Jamie Gong, a fourth year linguist who started shooting in Michaelmas. “If you shoot poorly, you get a low score, which feels quite shit – but we’ve all had bad days so we’re all really supportive of each other. And it’s an amazing feeling when you have a day when you shoot really well. It’s such a great adrenaline rush.”
Cuppers, which will be held on Thursday of 4th week, will be a variant on the crowd-pleasing Falling Plates competition: teams will race to knock down 5 targets in the shortest possible time.
The 16 teams with the best times will qualify for the final stage, in which they will go head- to-head in a three-round knockout tournament. By the end of the night, fifteen teams will have been knocked out, and the surviving team will be crowned Pistol Cuppers Champions 2014.
For beginner teams, training will be provided over the course of 3rd week. Teams will be coached in all the basics elements of marksmanship, and the competition is open to anyone, including those who haven’t shot before. Colleges are welcome to enter more than one team of two.
To join the club or to watch Cuppers, contact Priscilla Fung (OUPC Captain): [email protected]
