By Gil LeBreton
glebreton@star-telegram.com
LONDON -- It is a sport where perfection is measured in tenths of a millimeter.
For a rifle shooter at the Olympic level, emotions -- and your heartbeat -- have to virtually stand still.
Try to imagine, therefore, TCU's Sarah Scherer.
Only 21 years old, Scherer finished in seventh place Saturday in the London Olympics' women's 10-meter air rifle event.
It was not her first Olympics, but that's part of Scherer's story.
Four years ago, Sarah and Stephen Scherer, sister and brother, raised in Woburn, Mass., were the surprise sensations of the U.S. Olympic Shooting Trials.
Stephen made the team. His kid sister barely missed. But Sarah went on to Beijing to cheer for her brother and watched him finish 27th in a field of 51 air rifle shooters.
Karen Monez, head coach of the TCU rifle team, had never seen or heard of the Scherers before those '08 trials. But she offered Sarah a scholarship, and Stephen, who had been at West Point, soon joined his sister in Fort Worth and became a volunteer assistant coach.
In the spring of 2010, TCU became the first all-female rifle team to win an NCAA championship. Freshman Sarah Scherer was national champion in the smallbore event.
No one really knows what was going on in her brother Stephen's mind as that summer turned into fall. He was depressed, Sarah recalled, and his interest in rifle was waning.
Still, it didn't prepare Sarah or her mother Susan when, on the morning of Oct. 3, 2010, Fort Worth police rang her doorbell and told them that Stephen had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
"She's a tough young lady," Susan Scherer said of her daughter. "She's been handling a lot well."
In a sport that demands unflinching focus and concentration, Sarah Scherer said Saturday that her brother is "always with me. He's a part of who I am."
A return to the Olympics, four years after Stephen competed in them, could have taken an expected emotional toll on his younger sister.
Except that that wasn't all that was on Sarah's mind Saturday.
On July 14, she was at a friend's house in Fort Worth for a patio barbecue. The stairs were wet. She slipped, dislocating her left elbow and causing a radial head fracture.
What now, Sarah asked the hospital emergency room people? She had to leave for Denmark with the Olympic team in five days.
"It was one of those pains where you wish you could faint from it," she said, asked to rate the pain. "So it was definitely a 10.
"Right now, right after shooting, it hurts -- probably about a three or a four."
She didn't want to talk about it at first, it seems. Maybe for fear that someone will think she was blaming her seventh-place finish on the elbow.
The truth is that at an 11th hour when the Yi Silings and Sylwia Bogackas of the air rifle world were making their final Olympic preparations, Sarah Scherer was unable to take a practice shot for nearly two weeks.
"One thing shooters have to learn how to do, though, is control our body despite what it wants to do," Scherer said. "Let's say you have a runny nose and, as soon as you start shooting, your runny nose instantly goes away."
That same steely concentration, therefore, may be what has helped her deal with the loss of her brother. The two pains -- the elbow and the heart -- are still there.
"I always think about Stephen," Susan Scherer said Saturday. "It would have been great to experience this with him, and he would have loved to have been here. Of course it brings back memories."
Her daughter, Susan said, is "tough. She has self-control. She's a tough young lady. She's handling a lot well."
Sarah Scherer's left arm still bears the fallout from her July 14 accident. A long bruise runs from the top of her arm down past the elbow.
Still, she scored 397 of a possible 400 points in the qualifying round Saturday and qualified for the eight-shooter finals. No one in the Team Scherer camp seemed discouraged by her seventh-place final finish.
Scherer has one more season of eligibility left at TCU and, she hopes, a trip to the 2016 Rio Olympics.
In the meantime, the Scherer family tries to move on.
"The tears haven't all been shed," mom Susan said. "My emotions come out all the time. I cry in the car, I cry at the grocery store. Wherever I feel like crying I cry, because I miss him so much. We were always a very close family."
Like brother, like sister. It was Saturday, and the Scherers were back at the Olympics.
Gil LeBreton, 817-390-7697Twitter: @gilebreton
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