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September 2000
September 13 - Over the last 10 days or so, I have been fortunate enough to meet and talk with Wlodzimier Sklenarski (pronouncing his name is another story...), the Polish Pistol Team Coach and Krzysztof Kucharczyk, Polands leading Rapid Fire shooter. Krzysztof was the 1994 World Champion and placed 4th at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. I will try to summarise what we talked about on various aspects of shooting but please keep in mind some of these points do vary from person to person in what suits them best and that the Polish / English interpretations may not be strictly correct. I think I got the general ideas though...
Warm Up - Krzysztof has a warmup period of one hour, involving physical excercise and dry firing before any training session or competition. Wlodzimier stressed that is is most important to make sure it is the same routine for both practise and competition, you must be sure that you are fully prepared to shoot as there is no time to settle into the match as it is too late by then. Talking later to Krzysztof, he said that he often does some extra warmup before shooting in major competition to help reduce some of the nerves by being a little bit more 'tired' than in training. (About an extra 10-15 minutes of dry firing)
Ammunition - The leading Polish shooters have their ammunition supplied by the Polish Federation. (about the top 2 or 3 shooters in an event I think.) Most other 'serious' shooters purchase their ammo through their Club as the Club can get special rates by buying in bulk. An interesting note is that all the clubs have their facilities (ie. buildings and ranges) paid for by the army. Krzysztof uses RWS R25 Rapid Fire ammo in his Pardini pistol. The ammunition and pistol hold a group of about 40mm (8 ring on an Air Pistol target) over 25 meters.
'Professional shooters' - 'about' the top 10 shooters in Poland earn their living from shooting, the rest must work as per the rest of the population. One thing though, they keep up with their 'education' with most having 2 or more degrees from university.
How much shooting - Krzysztof shoots around 4 to 5 hours a day during the 'season' of February through to October each year. He shoots about 25,000 rounds of ammo a year. During the 'off season' he goes alpine skiing to keep up the physical fitness. He also does some dry firing at home all year round. The reason he was in Brisbane is that here he could shoot for 5 hours where as in Sydney at the Olympic range, it would have been limited to perhaps an hour or maybe two, due to the number of shooters and sharing ranges. (One of the other Polish Free Pistol shooters was also in Brisbane and was averaging 8 hours a day at the range. On one day he shot 4 full matches of Free Pistol in training.) Krzysztof brought 6,000 rounds of ammunition from Poland and was shooting about 500-600 rounds a day in training.
Coaching - the Polish Shooting Federation has 11 full time professional coaches that are funded by the Army. They are based at the major Clubs in Poland and are available for the shooters at any time.
Other Topics - there are around 50 pistol clubs in Poland. The population of Poland is about 38 million with 43 cities of 100,000+ population, but the land area (121,000 square km - 400 km top to bottom) of Poland would fit almost twice into Victoria (227,000 square km). You don't have to travel too far for an 'Open' shoot I guess...
It has been interesting to watch and openly talk to someone that shoots and trains Rapid Fire at 'World Class' level. We don't get exposed to this level of shooting in Australia very often. Not to say we (Australians) can't shoot this well, it has been good to remind me that we can do it and to see it done. Yes, Krzysztof does shoot the occasional 9, but there is not much left of the 'X' ring at the end of the training session. - Very motivating... look out!
