VIEW PROFILE: Peter Wilson

Champion shotgun star teaches ‘Wild Bill Walton’ a thing or two

THIS week view reporter Harry Walton talks to champion shooter PETER WILSON about representing Britian in double trap clay shooting

A SERIOUS shoulder injury turned a farmer’s boy into the country’s top gun.

Peter Wilson only dabbled in shooting at the time because his main interests were cricket and squash.

But when he went to Millfield School near Street he was seriously injured in a snowboarding accident barely six months after arriving.

Peter, of Glanvilles, Wootton said: “I broke one of the main shoulder nerves and was in and out of hospital for a year.

“I had a lot of treatment and, because I couldn’t play cricket or squash, I pursued my interest in shotgun shooting and became the best at Millfield even though I was doing it one-handed!”

Everyone he had played cricket and squash against was a year ahead of him now, so Peter decided to specialise in shotgun shooting.

He is now ranked first in Great Britain but the incredible twists and turns to get him there read like comic book fiction.

Peter said: “My shooting discipline at Millfield was English sporting shooting but you can’t pursue that at the Olympics because there is no such event.

“So I decided that if I wanted to make a career out of shooting then I had to take on one of the three Olympic disciplines if I was to stand any chance of earning a reasonable income.

“So I switched towards the end of my Millfield stay and tried Olympic skeet shooting which I was lucky enough to be very good at.

“But you have to live, eat and breathe that discipline to be Olympic material and it just didn’t have total appeal for me.”

He decided to move on and try double trap shooting where two clay targets are in the air at the same time but there was nowhere to shoot this very specialized discipline.

Peter said: “My father suggested that I go to the main national shooting centre at Bisley to shoot a day so I could at least see whether I liked it or not.

“When I arrived I accidentally walked straight into the British team and the rest is history.

“Their manager Ian Coley overheard me say at reception that I was there to shoot double trap and he invited me to shoot with the British team.

“I shot one round, shot well and Ian urged me to shoot in a competition the next day where I finished sixth, beating all the other GB juniors at the age of 19.”

He was inspired, took up double trap and within four months was European junior champion before going on to win every British junior honour there was including setting a new British junior record of 142 clays out of 150.

Peter became a senior and was sponsored by UK Sport for 18 months but then lost everything when the recession hit.

He said: “I went from being a top five shotgun shooter to a waiter in a pub in 24 hours which was pretty depressing.

“UK Sport dropped me and 50 other athletes because of budget cuts and I lost Ian Coley as my coach when I returned from the Olympics in Beijing where I had gone as an observer. The cuts were made for monetary reasons and because Great Britain didn’t win any medals.

“By chance I knew Athens gold medalist Sheikh Ahmed Maktoum who had decided to quit shooting after Beijing.

“He was looking for something new to do, saw me shoot and felt I had a future that he wanted to coach.

“All this happened on the brink of crashing out of the UK Sport umbrella, so when it did happen Ahmed stepped in and I flew out to Dubai to train with him.

“He said he would mould me into a future Olympic champion. That was in winter 2008 and I have come a long way since then.”

Peter, who is based at the top Southern Counties shooting facility near Dorchester which will stage the World Cup this May, underwent new training and new routines.

He said: “When five GB trials were held I won two, finished second twice and fourth once which ranked me first overall in the whole country.”

Peter is now preparing to do it all again with five GB 2010 trials between April 10th-September 18th.

He said: “I hope that I am successful again, can represent GB abroad and earn a place on the team for the 2012 Olympic Games where the shooting events will be held at Woolwich, London.”

Naturally when GB’s top gun invites you out on to the Southern Counties ranges you don’t say no.

So on a bitterly cold afternoon with horizontal snow showers sweeping in I took off my jacket, put the butt of Peter’s unique and very expensive shotgun in to my shoulder and prepared to make a fool of myself.

We began simply with the machine firing a single clay out over the range.

I blew it out of the sky with a surge of exhilaration and, when a second clay went up, Wild Bill Walton blew that to bits as well.

Even Peter seemed impressed, so why was he making such a fuss about something which seemed so easy? We then moved on to double trap and I found out.

Shooting one clay out of the sky is one thing but Peter said that two clays in the air at the same time was way more than twice as hard.

I shouted “Pull!” and two orange discs fizzed away from me. No sooner had I lined up the sights towards one than I began to panic that the other was getting away from me and I ended up missing both. Two more clays sailed away without a mark on them as I ruthlessly destroyed a distant clump of dandelions before sheepishly handing the gun back to Peter.

He then cranked up the machine for doubles from three different points and before you could say “Clint Eastwood” all six clays were calmly picked off and Peter stepped back to me through a swirl of gunsmoke which eddied away across the range.

Not a lot you could say really except it didn’t look like luck, just a highly polished and impressive piece of skill.

He is due out in Beijing this month to shoot in the second leg of the World Cup.

As we walked away in search of warmth Peter said that Southern Counties has one of the biggest shotgun facilities in the country.

He added: “I really can’t stress how lucky I am to have Southern Counties on my doorstep because I live just seven miles away.

“Other shooters have to travel as much as seven hours but I can drive here faster than you can cook breakfast.”

I drove away with the distinct feeling that Peter was cooking up something a bit different, perhaps even a 2012 Olympic medal. He deserves gold for his skill and dedication alone.

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