Army Marksmanship Unit Excels at Olympic Trials
Army Marksmanship Unit Excels at Olympic Trials
Four soldiers from the Army Marksmanship Unit have qualified to compete in shooting events at the Paris Olympics this summer.
Staff Sgts. Rachel Tozier and Will Hinton, from the unit’s trap team, qualified to compete in Olympic Trap at the Paris Games during USA Shooting’s shotgun Olympic trials.
“I came in quite a few targets back, so it’s been a grind this entire time, so I am still kind of processing the work I put in and where I am now,” Hinton said. “Everything I’ve been doing, you know all my training, has put me in where I am at, so I have to trust in that, and I am just happy to be on the team.”
Sgts. Ivan Roe and Sagen Maddalena, who are marksmanship instructors for the elite unit’s international rifle team, qualified to compete in the 50 m smallbore event.
While Maddalena competed in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, this will be Roe’s first Olympic Games.
“Representing the U.S. is … a dream I’ve had since I was a little kid. So, it’s a culmination of everything I’ve been doing the last two decades,” Roe said in an Army news release. “It’s a huge, huge milestone.”
Prior to the USA Shooting smallbore Olympic trials, Roe and Maddalena had already qualified to compete in the 10m air rifle event at the Paris Games.
Maddalena was determined to not let her air rifle qualification change her approach during the smallbore trials. “It didn’t have any impact because I knew I had to do my job on both guns and do it to the best of my ability,” she told the Army. “I knew I had the opportunity to go on both guns, but I still needed to do my job to take that opportunity that was presented.”
For Tozier, making the Olympic Team has been a dream since high school.
“There are not really words, and I don’t think it has really hit me yet,” she told the Army. “When I was a senior in high school, I wrote that I wanted to make the Olympic Team on my board of things to do, so it’s nice to be able to cross that off.”