Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Sportsplugged: ‘People say I’m like a machine’ By Karlon N. Rama Sun.Star Sports Columnist
ERIC Grauffel, the three-time International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) world champion, arrived in Cebu yesterday in the company of his father and representatives of his main sponsor, Armscor.
And while busy preparing for the Asean League Championships at the Cebu Pistol and Rifle Association (CPRA) firing range, he granted Sun.Star Cebu an exclusive.
Ever quick to the draw, the 26-year-old shooting athlete, amateur windsurfer and dog lover beat the journalist in firing the first question: “What do I wear?”
Grauffel began shooting when he was eight and began joining competitions a year later. He was 18 when he clinched his first World Shoot Championships here in Cebu in 1999.
He has since gotten married, put up his own gunsmithing firm, the Eric Grauffel Co., and regularly tours around the world holding shooting clinics. He held one such clinic at the Armscor Shooting Range in Marikina City over the weekend and will hold one here on the 15th and 16th.
It’s been seven years since you were last here for the World Shoot XII. How do you feel?
Yes, it’s been a long trip. But I am very happy for this opportunity to be back here once again. I visited the (CPRA) range right after we arrived. It was good. It was fun recalling the good time I had. It was a pretty interesting trip.
World Shoot XII must have been very memorable for you then?
Yes, it was my second World Shoot competition because I joined the one in Brazil. But it was my first championship title. I was 15 when I joined the 1996 World Shoot in Brazil. I guess I was too young to win then.
But you resolved that here in 1999. And you did it again in 2002 in South Africa and then again in Ecuador last year.
There was less pressure for me in 1999 because I was the one targeting someone. It was different then. I’m the target now. I’m the man to beat, that’s what they say. It’s easier when you are the one doing the catching up than when you’re the rabbit.
Is beating you even possible right now? You have won the world shoot thrice and hold almost all European championship titles.
I try to do my best all the time. Maybe I’m just more confident now than before in the sense that I know what I can do and now make fewer mistakes.
We’ll see. I’ll try my best; I mean it hasn’t happened yet. When we were in Ecuador, Todd Jarrett (1996 World Shoot champion) came to me and said this is probably my last chance of beating you so I’ll do my best and I said okay, I’ll also do my best and see what happens and it was a good match.
But if I get beaten, I want it to be somebody younger than me. That might be easier for me to digest. Someone just as old as me could be fine. But somebody 10 years older beating me is not acceptable.
But you’ll never know. This is a very mechanical sport. Anything can happen.
How do you prepare? You practice hard, but other athletes practice just as hard. You have good equipment, but so do a lot of other athletes. The mind set is the same because everybody wants to win just as hard. What do you do differently?
People say I’m like a machine. Like a machine everything runs the same way all the time. It’s like I don’t make much mistakes I know I do but maybe they mare more mistakes than me.
It’s probably because I’m the only shooter in the world today that builds his own guns. That might make the difference. I make my own guns. I get the parts from Tanfoglio but I make them. And I tune them myself. The effect is that if something goes wrong, I have only me to blame and can’t take it out on anybody else.
How does that discipline translate itself into shooting?
Gunsmithing is a precise discipline. If something goes wrong in one part of the gun, the whole gun doesn’t work.
The main objective is to not have anything go wrong. It’s the same in shooting. Don’t make mistakes. Everything must be precise all the time. Everything has got to work the same way.
Do you see that kind of consistency in the Filipino shooters you encounter in matches?
Filipinos, including the Australians, are the leading shooters in Asia. In the Open Division, you have Jag Lejano, Stephen Hinojales and there’s a new one, Kenneth Augustine, he’s a young kid.
They are always on top of the competitions I join in. I participated in the Australasian Championships in Bali (Indonesia, 2004) and they were on the top five.
