COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (August 8, 2018)
More than 200 athletes weathered four days of competition, 250 targets and a Final in each of the Shotgun disciplines at the Summer Selection Match that concluded today at the Hill County Shooting Sports Center in Kerrville, Texas.
This match selected the Shotgun athletes who will compete in the first two International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) World Cups of the 2019 season in Acapulco, Mexico and Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Not only was this match an important training opportunity for the athletes who qualified to compete at the ISSF World Championship later this month in Changwon, South Korea, but the World Cups will also be another opportunity following the World Championship for athletes to earn valuable Olympic Games individual quotas (Trap Mixed Team quotas are only available at the World Championship in Changwon). An Olympic quota is essentially a country’s ticket to compete in a specific event in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.
Some athletes shot more than 500 targets over eight days to earn a slot in multiple disciplines next year. Winning gold in Women’s Skeet and a silver in Women’s Trap was six-time Olympic medalist Kim Rhode. Rhode (El Monte, California) announced after her gold-medal win in Women’s Skeet at the World Cup last month in Tucson, Arizona that she was training to compete in Trap in addition to her signature Skeet event. Rhode didn’t disappoint, finishing with the highest Qualification score in both events (246/250 in Skeet and 226/250 in Trap). In Skeet, she also won the Final to get an additional three points added to her total for 249, but even with her fourth-place finish today in the Trap Final, she still finished in second place overall with a final score
