Three pistol shooters from the STS Performance Programme - Lucy Evans, Jess Liddon and Isobel MacTaggart - travelled to Serbia last week to compete at the Grand Prix Novi Sad 2022.
The first event was 10m Air Pistol, held at the SC “Sajmište” shooting range. The field was strong with Olympians, World Championship Finalists and European Medallists from 15 nations competing. All three girls coped well in the hot conditions with Jess delivering a score of 567 (13X) to qualify in 4th place and reach the final. Lucy and Isobel produced steady consistent performances of 555 (6X) and 546 (12X) respectively, narrowly missing out on medal positions in the Junior Women’s events, finishing in 4th and 5th place.
With a strong start to the final, Jess went on to enter the medal match against Olympic silver medallist Antoaneta Kostadinova from Bulgaria and finished the competition with a silver medal of her own.
With the 10m events concluded, the attention moved to the outdoor ranges, where Jess was competing on the 25m range. Conditions were difficult as Serbia was subject to the European wide heatwave, temperatures exceeded 40 degrees with only the slightest of breezes. The first 25m event was Sport Pistol, where the benefits of the hard work that Jess has been putting in to her training showed as she improved on her results from earlier this year with scores of 287 in precision and 287 in rapid to finish on an overall score of 574 (18X). This result qualified her in 2nd place for the final, again behind Antoaneta Kostadinova. Competing in the new finals format for Paris 2024, Jess shot in Semi Final 2 and unfortunately missed out on the medal match by 2 hits.
The last event of the competition was standard pistol. Despite being an open category, Jess found herself the only female on the start list. With a strong performance across all three stages, showing improvements in each series, Jess battled throughout the match with the Serbian Dusko Petrov for a medal position, the two constantly changing positions between 3rd and 4th, however with a strong 48 to finish in the 10 second series, it was Jess who came out victorious on a score of 556 (9X) to claim the bronze only 3 points behind the silver medal position.
Report by Tim Liddon
