Forty shooters from across the Caribbean are in Jamaica for the 2022 West Indies Shooting Council Championships, which will take place from October 24 to 29 at the Twickenham Park range in St Catherine after a two-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Top shooters from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Canada, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago will compete to win the title held by Trinidad and Tobago when the tournament was last held in 2019. However, there is likely to be a new twin champion -The island republic has sent just one shooter to the tournament this year. Barbados, too, has sent a lone shooter.
The six-country championship will feature shooters aiming at targets from a minimum distance of 300 to a maximum of 1,000 yards.
Guyanese Lennox Braithwaite, the Wogarth Cup champion, is back to defend his title having had the highest score in the short range team match last time out. However, he admitted to Sportsmax.TV that his confidence isn’t where it should be heading into competition.
“As athletes we try our best to prepare, but it’s been two years since we’ve shot and so the kind of preparation we would have liked to have not been able to do outdoors, but indoors, we would have done some of the exercises that would retain muscle memory,” he said, but as far as reading weather conditions and so on for two years we would have rested.
“I’m not so sure because I would guess that all the other teams are probably going through something like that or were in a better position in preparation. In Guyana, we didn’t have the use of strings until about a month ago, so we had some challenges there.”
Despite the challenges, Brathwaite said he plans to mount a tough defense of his title.
“I would like to defend that position, but at the same time I have to be realistic because there are people who want to win as well.”
He singled out shooters from Antigua and the host nation as ones to watch out for. “Nobody wants to get lost at home,” he said with a laugh.
Indeed, Jamaica would not want to lose at home and as such have fielded a strong squad led by Phillip Scott and including national champion Dwayne Forde, who is considered a ‘certain contender’ for the title individual.
The team also consists of Karen Anderson, Denis John Nelson, David Rickman, Denis Lee, Claude Russell, Nicola Guy, Jose Nunez and Canute CC Coley.
