Every athlete has their ups-and-downs, but one of Scotland’s greatest-ever shooters, Seonaid McIntosh, has experienced the most drastic examples of both in her career.
Still only 28 years old, McIntosh has been on top of the world more than once.
World champion, world record holder and world number one in multiple disciplines is quite a list of achievements.
But, McIntosh also knows what it feels like to experience sporting failure and, as a consequence, feel utter devastation.
Let’s start with the ups.
A world title in 2018 in the 50m rifle prone event was then followed by her rising to world number one in the rifle 3P rankings, and becoming world record holder.
She then highlighted her versatility by becoming world number one in the air rifle event last year and in the past four years, has accumulated an impressive seven World Cup gold medals
And then there’s the downs.
It was the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in which McIntosh hit her lowest ebb, in a sporting sense at least.
Having gone into the Tokyo Olympics as world number one in the 3P event, McIntosh was billed as one of Team GB’s brightest medal hopes.
Any opportunity to step onto the podium was, however, snatched away from her after a below-par showing in the preliminary events of both her events, ensuring she finished in 12th in the air rifle and 14th in the 3P meaning she failed to progress to either final.
It was a result McIntosh described at the time as “heartbreaking” but, reflecting on her Tokyo experience, she firmly believes she’s a stronger person for having survived the experience.
“I qualified for Tokyo in 2018 and then spent a long time waiting for it to actually happen. In the end, I just wanted it over and done with,” the Edinburgh woman says.
“The knock I took to my confidence after Tokyo took a lot to come back from. But after what I went through, I’ve become a more robust athlete.
“I’m definitely more aware of how I’m feeling now. Last time, I was constantly saying I was fine and so I maybe didn’t realise quite what I was actually feeling. Now, I’m much more aware of that.”
The pressure may have got to McIntosh in Tokyo but what’s so striking when hearing her talk about her hopes for Paris is not that she believes there will be any less pressure- quite the contrary, she’s heaping pressure upon herself to perform well – but it’s how she plans to cope with the pressure that will be different this time around.
Shooting, perhaps more than any other Olympic sport, is decided on the tiniest of margins – less than a millimeter can be the difference between joyous success or crushing disappointment - and having so little room for error unsurprisingly ramps up the anxiety levels even further.
The Scot suffers from Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis but is confident she now has a handle on her health issues as much as is possible and so, as she heads into this summer’s Olympic Games as a realistic gold medal prospect for GB, she’s confident that she’s far more capable of coping with the pressure upon her shoulders this time around than she managed in Tokyo.
“I feel like I’ve been performing really well this season and so I do feel the pressure to perform well one more time this year,” says McIntosh, whose impressive form in 2024 has seen her win four World Cup golds and has cemented her position as Britain’s most successful female shooter ever.
“I’ve spent the past few years learning how to perform regardless of stresses and distractions and so I do feel in a much better place and much more able to perform well, however I’m feeling.
“People say to treat the Olympics like a normal competition but it’s not a normal competition and I also don’t want to pretend the Olympics isn’t happening. But I know how to deal with distractions so I just need to deal with the kind that come up at the Olympics.”
Despite the fact that McIntosh is still in her twenties and competes in a sport in which it’s possible to continue well into one’s fifties or beyond, she admits she’s allowed herself to contemplate retirement.
It’s been little more than a fleeting thought but she reveals that if she were to win an Olympic medal this summer, to add to the World, European and Commonwealth medals already in her possession, she might well consider going out on a high and hanging up her gun for good.
“An Olympic medal is the only thing missing from my career so that does make me want it even more,” she says.
“I do sometimes think that if I do win an Olympic medal, that would be the full set – it would be my career complete in some ways and I could just stop. That does pop into my head but I’m not certain that’s what I’d do if I win an Olympic medal because it’s also about more than just medals because there’s so many parts of the sport I enjoy.
It would be very nice to complete the set, though, whether that’s in Paris or at a future Olympic Games.”
