Professional Training by a Training Professional

The odd one out is mum.

While her husband, father-in-law, son and two daughters are dab hands with a shotgun, she would rather watch paint dry. “As she has turned our cow shed into an art studio for painting courses, she frequently does,” grinned 15-year-old Sally Bond, settling herself in front of the scrubbed pine table.

She is tall for 15 – 5ft 10ins – and has a strong handshake. She is also a remarkably level-headed and articulate teenager, although modest about her achievements with a shotgun.

Sally may be the youngest in the family, but she has just taken gold in the under-19 women’s junior skeet (clay pigeon) competition at the Australian Youth Olympic Festival. Now it’s odds-on she will win gold at the 2012 Olympics.

“But I really got the gold in Australia by default,” she insisted. “I was the only one in that particular competition. There was no one else good enough to enter! So, I shot in the boys’ competition – and I beat some of them, too!”
That seemed to please her more than the gold medal. “Well, I like to win,” she smiled, “and, yes, I want to win Olympic gold, but I have a lot of hard work to do before then.”

Sally lives with her parents, her older sister, Katy, 20, and five extremely friendly dogs in a comfortable farmhouse in St Osyth. Her father is an arable farmer – wheat and beans – and being able to handle a shotgun became a way of life for Sally, Katy and their brother, David, 22.

“I was 13 when I first began learning how to shoot,” she said. “By that time, David had been shooting for about 11 years. When he was 16 he won the World Junior Championship, so I had a lot to live up to.”

With Katy also proving she could handle a gun, and her father still competing in local competitions, shooting has to be in the genes. But it is Sally who is showing she can really have an impact on the world stage.

“When David was doing well, dad built a shooting range in one of our fields so he could practise. Now that’s where I practise,” she said.

But the only way she will be part of the British Olympic shooting team is via competitions. The more points she wins at selection shoots, the more chance she has of making the national squad for 2012. Currently, her aim is to keep her place as a junior. She made the seven-woman squad for Australia – she was the youngest by far – and her next goal is a world championship. But how do those outside her family and the shooting fraternity view a 15-year-old girl who is as comfortable with shotguns as her peers are with handbags?

“There are some people who have this girls and guns don’t go’ thing, and sometimes they look at me as though I shouldn’t be shooting, but…”

She shrugged. So what? As far as Sally is concerned, the people who matter are supportive.

“My friends are great. When they realised I was serious about shooting, they became interested and have decided it is cool to shoot.”

Sally doesn’t confine her shooting to skeet competitions. She and her father shoot game birds, too, and sell the pheasants and partridges to local shops.

“I use the same gun for all my shooting because I only have the one shotgun. Dad bought it for me when I started,” she said. “You stick to your first gun as long as you can. Even if you have to buy another, you never sell your first gun. It becomes part of you.”

Sally’s gun has a 28-inch barrel, a 12-inch stock and weighs eight pounds. Her targets – clay pigeons or skeets – are 4 inches in diameter and can be fired up to 400ft into the air in rapid succession. She has no more than 11/2 seconds to aim and shoot. Her reactions, eyesight and body strength must be phenomenal. And she has to keep them that way, too. When it comes to other sports, she has to be so careful.

“I cannot risk being injured,” she said. “Any injuries to my arms, hands, trigger finger, even breaking an ankle, would seriously affect my training.”

Which, in turn, would mean poor performances in competitions and an even poorer chance of winning world championships. So, while she enjoys netball, she keeps to matches at school (she is a pupil at Clacton County High). Would she ever contemplate giving up competitive shooting as her sister had done? She looked at me as though I was mad. Once she has got competitions out of her system, she wants to coach. Anything else would be like watching paint dry.