Next one on the shelf. “Competitive Pistol Shooting” by Dr Laslo Antal. 2nd edition. Published in 1989. It’s so old that it covers “all the UIT disciplines.” Who, reading this, remembers the olden days of UIT? Would they even know what UIT means? I think, dangerous, Union International de Tir, translated into Franglais as ISU, which is what I used to shoot. ISU skeet that is. I don’t know if ever there was ISU Trap. I never heard of it. Oh, incidentally, the Franglais refers to International Shooting Union, which is only a translation – it wasn’t two different organisations.
Anyway, Dr Antal, who represented England and GB at lots of things, escaped, if that’s not too strong a word, from Hungary in 1957. If you haven’t read much about the Hungarian Revolution, I’ll just give one short quote from Wikipedia – “by January 1957, the new Soviet installed government had suppressed all public opposition.” You can imagine there’s a bit of catching up to do if you are unaware of the history. But I digress. Naturally.
You will be asking, even at this early stage, that there’s not much about shotgun shooting in these books. Correct. As I said, I think, in the post relating to Book 1, in the olden days there was sod all available on shotgun shooting. It was a case of seek and hope to find. There’s much in the 5 parts of this book, but maybe, maybe, part 5 is the best as it deals with “The Principles and Practice of Training and Match Preparation.” There’s a number of subsections of course and I can imagine, in 1989, I’d be only too grateful for some of the chapters on training plans, match preparation, relaxation, when I’d be struggling to create the inevitable 20 page essay on whatever coaching topic had been presented to us.
Realise, please, I had zilch help in those days and was struggling to get any information on high level international coaching. Micro, Macro and Meso might as well have been Martian. It was all right for the guys with the big federations behind them, but a wee punter from Scotland was always going to find it hard going.
Anyway, I’m still here. Be good.
