COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (August 24, 2018)
The race to snag Olympic quotas officially starts next week at the International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) World Championship August 31 – September 15 in Changwon, South Korea. The USA Shooting Shotgun Team has a good chance of garnering a good number of medals and quotas in its trip east. Of the 17 medals the U.S. won at the 2014 ISSF World Championship, 11 of them came from the Shotgun events. At the 2017 Shotgun World Championship, the U.S. garnered 12 medals to finish second in the medal count and this year’s team looks to build on those numbers in Changwon.
The three women on the Open Skeet team have proven they’re some of the best in the world, with each woman winning at least two World Cup medals this year alone. Six-time Olympic medalist Kim Rhode (El Monte, California, pictured right) has won gold in three of the four World Cups this season alone, but she will be looking for redemption on the World Championship stage after finishing in fourth place at last year’s Shotgun World Championship in Moscow, Russia. Rhode is the top-ranked Women’s Skeet shooter in the world, was 2017’s ISSF Female Shooter of the Year and seems perhaps poised more than ever to bring home her fourth World Championship medal. The last time Rhode won a medal at a World Championship was when she won bronze in 2011.
Joining her will be the world’s third-ranked Women’s Skeet athlete Caitlin Connor (Winnfield, Louisiana, pictured left), who’s won two silver medals during this year’s World Cup season. Connor also won silver in a shootoff against teammate Morgan Craft at the 2015 Shotgun World Championship in Lonato, Italy.
Rounding out the Women’s Skeet
