Vincent Hancock was twelve years old when he first stepped foot on an Olympic shooting range. He’d grown up watching his brother and dad compete locally and started hitting targets himself when he was ten. Still, the Georgia native didn’t know skeet shooting was an Olympic sport until someone invited them to the range where the shooting competition was held at the 1996 Atlanta Games and said the Olympics happened there five years before.
Hancock wasn’t even old enough to participate in 4-H competitions, but he could practice in the place built specifically for the Olympics. He pointed a shotgun toward the sky in front of him, pulled the trigger, and hit a flying piece of clay. The next day, he returned to shoot again, but without the same success. “I hardly hit anything,” he said. “It was the biggest challenge’d ever faced in my life. On that drive home, I told my parents, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to go to the Olympics, and I want to win a gold medal.’”
Hancock went on to snag that lofty prize. Then he did it again. And again. Now the 35-year-old heads into the skeet shooting competition at the Paris Games with a chance to win a fourth gold medal in the same individual event—something that only six other athletes have ever done, including U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps.
It hasn’t been a straight shot to the top for Hancock—or for shooting sports in general. Almost two decades after he fired those rounds in Georgia, he put down his gun for a year while the COVID-19 pandemic caused worldwide shutdowns. He came back “better than ever” and wants to bring more American talent to the international stage—a route that runs straight through Texas.
Hancock already had two gold medals by 2014, when he moved to Fort Worth and started training younger athletes. Soon thereafter, he spotted Austen Smith shooting in a local competition when she was about thirteen. He crossed the field and asked her dad if they wanted to work with him. Conner Prince teamed up with Hancock in 2018, when a former member of the U.S. shooting team introduced them. He was just out of high school.
Now Smith is 23, Prince is 24, and the three of them—all based in North Texas—regularly meet at Northlake Shooting Sports, a range Hancock owns on the north side of the Metroplex. They also make up three of the four members of the U.S. skeet shooting team that began qualification rounds on Thursday in Paris. “Both of us are his students and we’re on the Olympic team,” Smith said. “We’re three quarters of the team, and we’re all right here. I think that speaks volumes about what Vinny can do. I’m getting to the point of where I think it’s an unfair advantage.”
There are many ways to practice skeet shooting. It can be as simple as someone throwing a piece of clay into the air while a shooter attempts to hit it with a shotgun blast in a Rockport field on the outskirts of Corpus Christi (as it was in this writer’s experience). But in Olympic skeet, a stationary shooter waits between two houses that throw out clay pigeons at different speeds and different heights, then tries to shoot the targets out of the air. After each attempt, the athlete moves to the next of eight stations set up in a half-moon, taking 25 shots in all. The competitors complete this circuit five times before the top contenders face off in a final round.
There are no judges in skeet. “The only reason I got into this is it’s black or white,” Smith said. “You either hit it or miss it, and there’s no in-between. It’s all based on how I do, not on anyone else’s opinion.”
The disc used in Olympic skeet competitions is 110 millimeters wide (about a four inches), so small that it can be hard to see on TV—although the clay pigeons explode into an easy-to-spot cloud of colored dust when shot. And besides, the beauty of the Olympics isn’t knowing exactly how Simone Biles executes a double layout with a half-twist or how Katie Ledecky’s stroke in the pool pulls her body several lengths ahead of competitors. It’s sitting on a couch and watching extraordinary athletes do something you could scarcely dream of achieving. There’s marvel in the mystery and in the stories of those competing.
The three Texas skeet shooters are at different stages in their careers. These are Prince’s first Olympic Games, Smith’s second, and Hancock’s fifth. They’ve each made it to the end of a months-long gauntlet to make Team USA, where each match along the way takes an entire week to complete. Even Hancock called it “such a difficult process.”
He first made the team in 2008 and secured the gold medal that year in Beijing. In London he repeated the victory. By the time the Rio games came around, in 2016, he was an overwhelming favorite to win again.
Instead, he didn’t even make the podium and finished fifteenth overall. “I let a lot of little things bother me and totally changed my outlook on going out and competing at that particular event,” he said. “I knew what I did wrong and I wanted to make sure I never made those mistakes again.”
Hancock made his fourth Olympic team in March 2020. Then COVID-19 hit the United States and he made a decision to take a step back from the sport. Nearly nineteen years to the day after he first went shooting at an Olympic facility, Hancock put his shotgun away. “I didn’t touch my gun,” he said. “I didn’t do anything. I thought, ‘For the first time in my life, I’m just going to spend time with my family and do nothing else.’ I got to spend so much time with my girls. That’s something they’ve never gotten from me and I‘d never been able to give them before.”
In early 2021, he started training again to prepare for the rescheduled Olympics. “It was better than I’d ever been,” he said, laughing. “I came back, and within three weeks, I was already averaging a full target above before.” Hancock took home his third gold in men’s skeet shooting that year.
Hancock and Prince will shoot in the men’s skeet competition in Paris, while Smith will partake in the women’s competition along with Dania Vizzi, who is from Florida. Smith and Hancock will also form a mixed skeet team in another event. “Anybody could have made our team, women and men’s side,” Smith said. “We run extremely deep in terms of talent.”
After the Paris Games, the athletes will return to their full-time jobs but continue to train on the side. Prince is a manager at his dad’s machine shop in Burleson and Smith is a student at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she studies aerospace engineering. Hancock will continue to work with high school clay shooting teams and other athletes at Northlake Shooting Sports, hoping to make DFW more of a hub for the activity. Already, past skeet Olympians have moved to the area in recent years, including Amber English, who won gold for Team USA in Tokyo.
Interest in the sport is growing—a trend that Hancock aims to carry on in Texas. Thirteen high school teams practice at the Northlake range, with hundreds of athletes practicing weekly. “We are a completely untapped market that is ripe for the taking,” he said. “If people would take the time to understand it, they would see we’re the same thing as golf. We’re just doing it with a shotgun.”
He realizes that some Americans might recoil at the notion of shooting sports—or even gun ownership in general—but he sees the Olympics as an opportunity to disarm those concerns. “While there is a stigma around our sport because of guns, if you look at our sport, we are the safest in the world,” Hancock said. “We have fewer injuries than table tennis on a yearly basis. Our biggest thing is teaching respect and safety.”
Hancock isn’t planning to hang up his shotgun after these Olympics, but as his “career starts to wane,” he does plan to focus more on coaching . “I know that, realistically, I can do this for a very long time—into my fifties or sixties possibly,” he said. “But I don’t want to. I’m 35. This will be my fifth Olympic Games and, honestly, if you had asked me how many I’d go, I would’ve said three or four max. Now number six is in L.A. I’ll probably have to try for that.”
