Gibsons resident Allan Harding will be representing Canada at the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto in the men’s 10-metre air pistol competition.
The Pan Am Games are one of several international competitions in which athletes can secure a quota spot for their country to compete in that sport at the Olympics. Canada has not qualified to send a male pistol shooter to the Olympics since 1996.
Harding will be looking to break the 20-year drought and get a quota spot for the 2016 Olympics, which will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“My training has been going really well,” Harding said. “The past two months my coaches and my performance vision team and I have worked to make some minor changes to how I go about taking each shot.”
The qualification will be Sunday morning, July 12, and then only the top eight proceed. In the final round, each athlete has his score reset to zero and they start again in a shoot-off with a shooter getting eliminated every two shots after the eighth shot is taken.
This is Harding’s third year on the international shooting scene. In 2012 he attended the World Cup in Milan and in Munich. In 2014 he competed for Canada at the XX Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland as well as each stop in the ISSF World Cup Series, including the World Championships in Spain.
This year he has competed at the ISSF World Cup in Changwon, South Korea and in Munich, Germany.
Harding trains locally at the Sunshine Coast Rod and Gun Club in Wilson Creek as well as at ranges in Richmond and Port Coquitlam.
