Fort Worth’s Vincent Hancock aiming for third gold medal at Summer Games
Vincent Hancock has a saying when it comes to the Olympics and chasing a third gold medal in skeet shooting later this month in Tokyo.
“If you don’t miss, you can’t be beat,” said Hancock, a Fort Worth resident who trains out of Fort Worth Trap & Skeet Club. “I’ll do my best to break every single target. That’s my goal. Like I said, if you don’t miss, you can’t be beat.”
Hancock will be making his fourth appearance in the Summer Games. He won a gold medal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and backed it up with another gold in 2012 in London. He qualified for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janiero, but failed to advance out of the qualifying round and finished 15th.
How fine of a line is it between winning a gold medal and not advancing? The man who won gold in 2016 hit two more targets than Hancock in the qualifying round.
“Two targets,” Hancock said, “It is a very fine line.”
But Hancock likes his chances of bringing home another gold medal this time around. He’s been practicing and preparing for the Games for more than a year after qualifying for the team in March 2020. The Olympics were postponed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m trending in the right direction with the way that I’ve set myself up to peak in Tokyo,” said Hancock, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit. “I’ve been shooting well for the last few months and now it’s about getting extra comfortable going there. I had a perfect qualification score the other day in practice and then a perfect final score, so that’s a great thing a few weeks out. I’m going to continue to try to build on that.”
Hancock shot a perfect score in the final of the 2012 London Games to secure his second gold medal. As he said, that is the only way to ensure he walks away from Tokyo with another gold medal.
The skeet shooting competition is scheduled for July 25 and 26 in Tokyo. The final will be around 4 p.m. in Japan, which in Texas is about 2 a.m. on July 26.
What’s skeet?
The shooting sports at the Olympics have different disciplines such as skeet.
Skeet is the name of the game, as shooters use shotguns to break clay targets flung into the air at speeds in the 60 mph range from a variety of angles out of two fixed stations. The two stations are referred to as the high house and the low house.
“The sport was originally invented by two guys in London practicing for hunting,” Hancock said. “The targets cross over a central point and we shoot them from eight stations that are laid out in a semicircle.”
At the Olympics, skeet competitors will shoot 125 targets over two days and the top six will advance to the finals. At that point, scores are reset and shooters are in a knockout-style format where the low-shooter after 20 targets is eliminated until there is a champion.
“It’s a long process and then it’s a sprint at the end,” Hancock said. “It’s fun being there for the finals.”
Hancock went on to say the sport has similarities to golf.
“We’re similar in the fact that we have a mechanical aspect to manage every time. We have a pre-shot routine,” Hancock said. “We also face varying conditions with weather, whether rain, wind, snow, sleet. I’ve competed in everything.
“But it’s a lot of fun to do and you can do it your entire life.”
