Was there a guy called Malcom Cooper I believe, meet him many moons ago.
Malcolm & Sarah they were small bore champions, I bought Malcolm a beer at the Munich shooting competition in the early 80s. Sadly he passed too young.
Malcolm Cooper, who has died of cancer aged 53, was Britain's leading marksman in three different shooting disciplines: air rifle, and three-positional (prone, standing and kneeling - PSK) shooting in both .22 at 50 metres and full-bore at 300 metres. Between 1977 and 1990, he won 149...
www.theguardian.com
Fri 15 Jun 2001
Malcolm Cooper, who has died of cancer aged 53, was Britain's leading marksman in three different shooting disciplines: air rifle, and three-positional (prone, standing and kneeling - PSK) shooting in both .22 at 50 metres and full-bore at 300 metres. Between 1977 and 1990, he won 149 international medals, including many world, Commonwealth and European championships, but the summit of his achievement was the winning of Olympic gold medals (for .22 PSK) in Los Angeles in 1984 and Seoul in 1988.
Born in Camberley, Surrey, he was the son of a naval officer. His first experience of shooting, aged 13, when he was at the Royal Hospital school, Holbrook, Suffolk, was not auspicious: while determined to overcome the discouragement of the master in charge, he missed the target with all 10 shots.
But by the following year, when his family had moved to New Zealand, he had worked out how to achieve the best possible results, by identifying the fundamentals of technique and how to apply them, and then making sure that his body was able to fulfil the demands made on it. Before returning to Britain, aged 16, he was shooting for Auckland City.
While Cooper worked as a shipwright's apprentice in Portsmouth dockyard and qualified as a naval architect, his shooting progressed, and he joined the Hampshire county team. By 1970, he had won the Great Britain PSK championship, as he did regularly for the next 20 years.
All this was at 50m, but he was also interested in shooting at 300m. The British facilities for this were negligible: nowhere to shoot, and nothing competitive to shoot with (ammunition or rifle). However, eventually a 300m range was provided at Bisley. Having used Walther rifles at 50m, Cooper used a Walther action at 300m - and made his own ammunition. In 1977, he won the European 300m champ-ionship, setting a world record, the first of 15. Next year, he won again at the 300m world championships, in Korea.
With such performances, his preparation for the 1980 Moscow Olympics began to look persuasively good. Then the USSR went to the aid of the communist regime in Afghanistan. Sanctions were discussed; the UK government, in a cheap gesture, allowed sports associations to make their own policy. It was Cooper's bad luck that the National Smallbore Rifle Association decided not to send a team - many thought that he had a good chance of a medal.
He did not rail at his misfortune, but just got on with refining his technique and making his body a reliable gun platform. Before 1972, he had daily swum 30 lengths and run five miles, and he carried on doing so, less frequently, until 1990. Few international shooters followed such a schedule, and none kept it up for as long.
In 1982 came the Commonwealth Games at Brisbane and the World Championships at Caracas: Cooper won gold medals at both, setting a 300m world record at prone in the latter. When he got to the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, he had a stiff tussle with Alister "Jock" Allen, before winning his gold. With Jock and Mike Sullivan, Cooper brought back the best-ever collection of GB rifle-shooting medals, and the first golds since 1908.
The following six years saw a continual run of success at the highest level; with gold medals in the world championships in 1986 and 1990, the European championships in 1985, 1987 and 1989 - and the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Never before had a British shooter done so well.
It occurred to few to ask how all this was paid for: inevitably, it was achieved by self-sacrifice. The cost of travel to foreign events, and high-temperature and altitude training, came from his small shooting-supply business and a modest grant.
Ultimately, the Sports Aid Foundation provided support that, according to Cooper's wife Sarah, saved their marriage. They had married in 1974, when Sarah Robinson was the British women's shooting champion: she was an outstanding air rifle and PSK shooter. They always brought impressive calm to any team they participated in, and, for England, they jointly won the small-bore pairs event in the 1986 Commonwealth Games. Sarah exercised and shot alongside Malcolm, and their dedication was total - they had no children, televison or pets.
In 1991, Cooper was found to have a diseased pituitary gland. After an operation, he had hormone therapy, which took some time to balance. So, he retired from competition, and turned his talents toward the production of target rifles of his own design.
His precision engineering company, Accuracy International, entered a bid for the production of a sniper rifle for the British army. He and his team produced the winning design, for an innovative, single-shot, magazine-fed rifle.
This design was refined to win a contract to supply the Swedish army. A later, long-range, version won a hotly contested contract for the German army, and the firm gained the Queen's Award for export achievement in 1998. Cooper was appointed MBE in 1984.
In 1999, he decided to take a lesser role in his business. He enjoyed hunting and shooting, until his cancer made it impossible to continue, and was nursed at home by Sarah until the end.
Malcolm Cooper, marksman, born December 20 1947; died June 9 2001
