OLD GIRLS

Pictured here as the flag bearer for the Great Britain shooting team at the opening ceremony of the San Marion World Cup in June this year, Nicki started shooting originally about 9 years ago, encouraged by Louise Baltesz (nee Nickerson) whom she had become good friends with in the Sixth Form at Malvern. Louise invited her for a shooting lesson and the coach identified that Nicki had good hand eye coordination and suggested that shooting was a sport that she might enjoy. She went home and immediately sought out her local shooting ground and a coach and took up her new hobby, buying her first shotgun about a year later. Louise then invited Nicki for her first day's game shooting at the family estate in Lincolnshire and she was hooked! A few years later Louise invited Nicki for another lesson but this time with her regular coach; it was his opinion was that Nicki had “the potential to shoot to an Olympic level” and directed her towards the discipline of Olympic Skeet – supposedly the most difficult of all the clay shooting disciplines! That comment changed Nicki's focus in life: previously a regular competitive tennis player, she let the tennis take a back seat and began to take shooting seriously. She set about trying to master Olympic Skeet and had met her challenge!

After a lot of ups and downs and one or two changes in coach, 5 years later she qualified to shoot for Great Britain Ladies Olympic Skeet team in April 2009. At that event the GB ladies won the bronze team medal – Nicki is the one on the left of the right hand podium; the Great Britain team came third to the USA and Italy.

Skeet was invented in the 1920s as a sport called Clock Shooting by an American called Charles Davies who was an avid grouse hunter. The original course was a circle with a radius of 25 yards with its circumference marked off like the face of a clock and a trap set on a tree stump at the 12 o'clock position. The practice of shooting in all directions had to cease as this became unpopular with a neighbour who started up a chicken farm and reasonably claimed that the regular impact of pellets on the birds were having an unsettling effect on his chickens! Another trap was therefore installed 42 yards from the first on another tree stump, to maintain all the angles whilst protecting the hens; the shooters fired from the stations on the semi circle connecting the two traps. The second trap was several feet higher than the first and the targets were thrown with a random delay after the shooter's call, for the sake of realism.

Skeet is a recreational and competitive sport where participants attempt to break clay disks flung into the air at high speed from the two traps at a variety of angles. The speed, height and angle of the targets as well as the sequence of both single and simultaneous pairs of targets shot remain the same wherever in the world the discipline is featured. There is also a random delay of between 0 to 3 seconds after the shooter has called for the target. In addition, the shooter must hold his or her gun so that the gun butt is at mid-torso level until the target appears. The gun is then quickly mounted and the targets shot. There are several other domestic clay target disciplines, including English Skeet (which is considerably easier than the Olympic version) that can be shot competitively at an international level but which are not featured in the Olympics. Olympic Skeet is one of the International Shooting Sports Federation events and is one of 3 clay target shooting disciplines (the other two being Olympic Trap and Olympic Double Trap) found in the Olympics; skeet has had Olympic status since 1968.

Nicky is currently ranked No 3 in the Senior Ladies in the country and is pictured back home, holding the trophy the team won.