IT is tempting to imagine Jen and Seonaid McIntosh jumping out from behind the sofa as toddlers to stage re-enactments of the Wild Bunch or Reservoir Dogs with replica toy guns. But in fact, when these two singular Scottish shooting siblings joined up with their father Donald in Australia in 2006 for a holiday after the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, there was little indication at all that these two girls would go on to uphold the proud family tradition.
Sure Donald, having shot for Scotland in 2002, had graduated to a coaching role by now, and mum Shirley famously had four Commonwealth medals from rifle events gathering dust in the cupboard, but Jen, recently started at Dollar Academy, was showing little inclination towards spending her future with a firearm with Seonaid far keener on drumming away with the school pipe band.
Yet fast forward 12 years to next April in the Gold Coast and the pair will cross the world once again with a more than decent shot of adding some more precious metal to this family’s already groaning collection.
Named this week in the second tranche of selections for Team Scotland, Jen has already outstripped her mother’s tally to be the most decorated (at least in terms of total medals) of any Scottish athlete in Commonwealth Games history with five. And Seonaid, now 21, has her big sister in her crosshairs.
Not only did these two sisters both leave the European Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan, with a gold medal apiece, but at November’s Commonwealth Shooting Federation Championships which doubled as a test event for the games, Jen returned with gold and Seonaid returned with gold AND silver. Spurred on by this healthy sibling rivalry – and almost certainly entered into the same three events, the air rifle, 50m rifle prone, 50m rifle 3 positions - Seonaid hopes this will be her time.
“Yeah, hopefully,” she said. “I have been on good form this year so I’m looking forward to it. I am a lot closer to beating her [Jen] now that I used to be. I’m perfectly capable of winning and she is perfectly capable of winning. We are far closer than we used to be ability-wise.”
Seonaid says the pair are “best friends as well as sisters” but this still becomes rather complicated when the competitive instinct comes into play. Perhaps wisely, Seonaid has no truck with Twitter as she fears it would become a constant dialogue between the two gloating about their respective victories against each other. “I don’t like Twitter or want to have Twitter and I think it is probably a good thing because if we both had it I think we would just be like ‘Beat you!’, then ‘No, I beat you!’. It would just go back and forward!”
The pair will share a flat, but not a room, in the Gold Coast athletes’ village – “It is good to have her around but not sharing a room as we both need our own space,” says Seonaid – and when the games come round this April, she also can’t quite seem to work out whether it would be better or worse to be beaten by her sister.
“Both at the same time - it is conflicting!” said Seonaid. “Before my last shot [in the 50m rifle prone in Brisbane], I heard someone behind me saying I needed a 10.9. They actually said ‘she needs a 10.9 to win’ but I just heard ‘she needs a 10.9’ and I thought they meant to medal.
“I fired a 10.0 and thought ‘oh well’ but then I looked at the scoreboard and there were two Scottish flags - McIntosh, McIntosh,” she added. “I didn’t see the letters next to it and I thought ‘oh, God’, then I was like ‘ah, no, it’s not me’ but I was happy to get a silver. The whole thing was sad, happy, sad, happy!”
Seonaid is an athlete in her prime at 21 years of age. So it is diverting to hear her talk about how, as recently as March, she required the use of crutches in the hours after competing, due to arthritis which her family put down to an infection acquired as a child rather than anything in her family history.
While a new course of medication happily seems to have prevented any further flare-ups, another boost is the warm conditions out on the Gold Coast, which should soothe her joints. But there were plenty of darker moments when only the support of this formidable family prevented her from giving up competing for good. Shooting pains, you might call them.
“Yeah, a lot of the time there were fears like that,” said Seonaid, an electrical engineering student enthused by the possibility of working in areas such as prosthetics or brain mapping when she graduates. “But when I went back to shooting it was still okay – I had to just push through it. I think a lot of athletes will have had that feeling - that sometimes it is just too hard but we all have to push through it. The family connection is there and that helped me stick with it and push through it and move on.
“Normally when my knees are bad, I can get about on crutches but when your wrists are bad as well, you can’t hold the crutches and that was really, really difficult and really painful,” she added. “It only lasts a few days at a time but it is enough. I could be on a crutches a couple of days after competing but now that I am on the new medication, that helps. It was March the last time I was on crutches. It is difficult to deal with that and do shooting but I would have the arthritis and the flare ups anyway, whether I did shooting or not.”
One such injury cost Seonaid the chance of competing in Rio - “The scores were kind of high but they were also scores I could have shot and that did definitely make me think ‘if I had been there then maybe I could have shot that’, that still pops into my head at times” - but hopefully there will be no such setbacks before the Spring. “It’s not genetic, or not so we know about,” said Donald. “We think it traces back to a bout of food poisoning when Seonaid was still in school. But the medication got it all stabilised early in the year, and it has been really good since then, long may it continue.”
It is a shooting squad, which in Jen’s words, is as strong, “both in terms of performance and how tight-knit the the athletes are” as any she has been part of, and Donald merely has the challenge of keeping both sisters on an even keel, win or lose. “You do get your moments,” he joked. “But no, they’re both perfectly capable of winning medals on their events – it is about who performs on the day.”
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