Steel Challenge is a fun shooting discipline that is shot all around the world.
The match is highly spectator-friendly and the competition is easy to understand – it is all about the speed. And by maintaining consistent challenges from year to year, the competition lends itself to the notion of setting – and breaking – speed records, which greatly adds to the excitement for shooters, spectators and media.
Steel shooting offers a port of entry to the shooting sports that is far less intimidating than other practical shooting disciplines. Steel shooting provides an excellent starting place for young or beginning shooters. It also provides a soft way for those who have begun to suffer the problems associated with ageing a vehicle to remain involved in the shooting sports. All this provides an alternative for those who might otherwise be lost to shooting.
The Steel Challenge World Speed Shooting Championships are one of the crown jewels of the shooting circuit and the premier professional pistol competition evemt the world over. With more than 220 of the world’s fastest shooters competing for over $390,000 in cash and prizes in 2007, it has found a permanent place on the shooting schedules of every major competitive shooter.
Founded in 1981, the first Steel Challenge saw just 70 shooters step into the shooting boxes of its now famous all steel stages. It was John Shaw who claimed the first title of ‘World’s Fastest Shooter’ along with his share of the $20,000 in cash and prizes. Since those early days the number of shooters has grown and the firearms industry has taken notice. Every major manufacturer participates in the Steel Challenge and the key to the success of the match can be found in the philosophy of its creators.
Mike Dalton and Mike Fichman, both accomplished competitive shooters, dreamt up the idea for the Steel Challenge as a way to expand the shooting sports.
“We founded the Steel Challenge out of our love for the shooting sports. We wanted a match that was challenging and fun but would also be easily understood by non-shooters who would see the competition and find within themselves a greater desire to join the shooting sports. We also believed that the sport needed a tournament that was media and spectator friendly,” said Mike Fichman.
Their match design called for simple stages, or courses of fire, made up of just five steel plates. The steel plates would be of differing sizes and placed at various distances and angles to create a variety of challenges. The shooter would assume his or her position in the shooting box and, upon the beep of the timer, draw their pistol and shoot each plate with the fifth being a stop plate synchronized to the timer.
Each shooter would shoot the stage five times with the slowest time dropped. The score would be the combined time of the best four runs and that time added to the combined times of the other stages for a final match score.
“From the start we knew we wanted an easy scoring system that any spectator could follow regardless of their shooting knowledge. The structure of using the four best runs out of five allowed shooters the opportunity to recover and provided added drama for those watching,” explained Mike Dalton.
Over the years the match has seen its fair share of drama as great champions have risen and fallen from one year to the next and sometime even within the course of a single match.
“We have watched world records set and broken on the same stage as one shooter followed another. We’ve seen great shooters collapse under the pressure of the match. And we have seen unbelievable comebacks,” said Fichman. “The Steel Challenge has never failed to excite.”