Why life hasn’t been all guns and roses for GB shooter

Seonaid McIntosh “never really wanted to do shooting”. That was sister Jen’s domain.

Five years older, she had already won Commonwealth Games medals before Seonaid had even properly picked up a rifle.

Instead, she was more prone to picking up a hefty drum in a pipe.

But sibling rivalry is a powerful thing.

Fast forward a few years and Seonaid is not only at to her second Olympics but has travelled to France with a gold medal in her sights.

She was world champion at 22, but while illness and a crisis of confidence undermined her Tokyo Games experience, she goes into the Paris edition ranked first in the world in the women’s 50m rifle 3 positions.

To say she is in fine form would be an understatement – only once this season has she failed to win an event she has entered.

Add in entries for the 10m air rifle and 10m mixed team rifle – the latter on Saturday – and there is every chance McIntosh will return from this Olympics with something around her neck.

The 28-year-old’s journey to reach this point has been a circuitous one.

Natural – perhaps hereditary – talent has blended with hard graft to overcome repeated health challenges and establish McIntosh as one of the world’s best.

Before her sister’s successes, dad Donald and mum Shirley were Commonwealth Games shooters themselves.

Not that it looked like Seonaid would follow their paths.

“We were never pushed towards shooting,” Jen tells BBC Sport. “In fact, Seonaid never wanted to do it for a long time.

“We are quite similar, quite competitive, so that made things like board games interesting at times.

“She says it like it is and yet she was very much an old soul. She always had a bit of a plan, was quite shy at times, a bit awkward now and again, but very mature.”

That plan looked like being a musical one. Like her sister, Seonaid went to Dollar Academy and became part of the school pipe band, run by Craig Stewart.

And it just so happened that Stewart was also the school’s shooting team coach.

“Seonaid is not a big lass, but she would carry this tenor drum that is 20 inches in circumference and try to march in time with strapping young lads at 6ft 2in with strides like giraffes,” he recalls.

“She was is in the middle of the band trying to keep up, but she never complained. She is a fantastic musician – she plays the drum kit as well – and was a world champion in piping and drumming with us.”

Such was her talent that, at one stage, there was even talk of McIntosh going to prestigious music schools in the United States, explains dad Donald.

“Music was her thing and that was the route she followed for quite a long time,” he says.

It soon became clear, though, that McIntosh had the potential to continue the family tradition on the shooting range.

Donald recalls she decided to join the family one day at the Alloa and District club having “done a wee bit of prone rifle shooting at school”.

Within a few hours, he was excitedly showing friend and five-time Commonwealth Games shooter Robin Law the paper targets Seonaid had aimed at.

“It was obvious there was something there pretty quickly,” he says.

Former Scotland coach Sinclair Bruce concurs, recalling an early meeting with Seonaid at Meadowbank shooting range.

“Shooting is littered with young people for whom it comes very easy, but they don’t last because they haven’t got the work ethic,” says Bruce. “Seonaid was never like that.”

Add in what Stewart affectionately calls her “thrawn” [stubborn] nature, and ability to listen and learn, and the family had another elite athlete around the dinner table.

For a while, McIntosh juggled her studies, music and shooting, but it was watching Jen compete at London 2012 that convinced her to prioritise the latter.

“She saw Olympic shooting in all its glory and thought, ‘I fancy a go at that’,” Donald explains. “Pretty quickly after that she said, ‘can I try shooting 3P?’

“That needed all sorts of kit we didn’t have, but I said she could start with an air rifle, because my old one was still in the house. And she just took off with it instantly.”

Jen, busy chasing her own dreams of Olympic success, was oblivious to the impact she had had. And oblivious to the fact her wee sister soon “pretty much exceeded everything I ever achieved”.

Medals of all different colours at world, European and Commonwealth level have all followed, but those trinkets are only part of Seonaid’s remarkable story.

Throughout her ascent to the top of her sport, she has dealt with arthritis and Crohn’s disease and admitted last year in an interview with BBC Sport to struggling with her mental health during the Covid lockdowns.

“She has never given in to any of it,” Donald says. “She got arthritis in her knees and spent a lot of her last year at school on crutches as the doctors tried to work out what was going on.

“There was talk of juvenile arthritis, which would clear up, but it didn’t work out like that, so she spent the next two or three years trying to shoot internationally while having a really rough time with it because she kept having flare-ups.

“She’s also got what is probably Crohn’s disease, which comes and goes and hospitalised her in Egypt at the World Championships in 2022, and some other bits and pieces, so she is in pain a lot of the time.

“That is pretty much her daily life and these things tend to just come and go for no apparent reason.

“It’s hard to remain positive sometimes when these things are beating you up, but she has learned to grit her teeth and move forward.”

Nobody has more admiration for Seonaid than Jen.

She knows how difficult it is competing at the top level, even without the health problems that have beset her wee sister.

“It was really difficult for a long time because there was a lot of uncertainty before she got the diagnosis,” Jen adds. “But as soon as she did get it, she was like, ‘well, this is what I have got and I am going to deal with it’.

“In many ways, she continues almost in spite of it, because she doesn’t want to let it hold her back and that is quite incredible to watch.”