Story by reader Cheryl Liew.
When people mention shooting as a sport, the first reaction from most people would be, “Are you SURE shooting is a sport?! Do the shooters even MOVE?!”. No doubt shooting is a sport that has minimal international recognition and similarly, that is also the case in Singapore.
Shooting is not really a sport unlike soccer where the audience flocks to watch and cheer. If you were to watch a shooting championship and cheer like you would do in a soccer field, people would not only think you are nuts, the range officers will probably throw you out of the range. Maybe this would account for the lack of popularity for the sport.
People also would think shooting is a boring activity. They would go, “Hah, you just pick up the gun and shoot. Then you put it down and repeat the action. Not boring meh?” As a shooter who has trained only for about 1 year plus, I must admit that shooting can be boring sometimes.
However, that is usually in the case for beginners.
When I first picked up the air rifle in JC1, I questioned my own ability to sustain the passion and interest in shooting. And this is with so many people around me going on and on about how shooting is mundane. However, after a while, I fell in love with the sport. And training became a way for me to challenge myself, to see how far I can stretch my abilities. Shooting is a sport that not only requires upper arm strength like most people believe. True, the absence of upper arm strength would most probably mean that a person would not be able to sustain long hours of training and holding on to the weapon. However, strength is not everything in a sport like shooting. It becomes a sport that tests of your ability to stretch and learn, to be able to acknowledge your own mistakes and learn from them. Its really a test of your self endurance, to beat your own personal record again and again instead of comparing your skills to other people. With all these, together with focus and concentration, would then determine how well each shot will turn out.
Thus shooting is actually a sport that can give people a tremendous amount of self achievement and experience that is different from what other sports can give.
Don’t give up! I picked up my first rifle in 1994 and took a 6 years break but now i’m back into it again first time in 6 years.
I found the happiness that I had missed for 6 years and the joy in that 1 hour of tranquility that belong to no one but myself. I would love to see the sports grow in Singapore.
Singapore young ones had done well in recent years with scores that are of World standard, now Singapore just need to make sure that they can sustain till the next olympics.
Well said. 😛
Shooting requires intense mental discipline – and the strange thing is this: as you get better and better, it actually gets harder and harder.
Hope you can sustain your interest in shooting. All the best. 🙂