25th anniversary, Egbert IJzerman

As the Chairman of the Stichting InterShoot Den Haag it is my pleasure to welcome you at the 25th international shooting match for air weapons, InterShoot 2002.

When I look back over the past 25 years I see many changes in a variety of areas in the shooting sport. Just to name but a few: introduction of the finales, special technical developments in arms, CO², electronic scoring, from manual target transports to electronic, new training techniques and last but not least the introduction of the computer.

Just look at the technological developments in the area of scoring. In the old days everything was manual, with a magnifying glass and plug gauge. Today scoring is done via advanced computer systems that automatically process the results. The results are then presented on TVs, screens or distributed via the InterNet at the speed of light. InterNet allows us to watch the matches or the results live from anywhere in the world. The only thing we need is an InterNet connection and these are available everywhere!

InterShoot has been following these developments as best as we could. Our finales are shot on electronic ranges, where the scores of the shooters are visible immediately after each shot. A score of 10 or higher very often results in cheers and applause these days. In the old days one was reminded to be silent on the ranges. Isn’t that great.

These are developments that are a good thing for our sport. We will have to put more effort in making our sport even more attractive for TV coverage. This is a big challenge for all of us, but specifically for changes this requires to the ISSF rules.

Individualism is visible everywhere in our society. In the Netherlands there is a potential shortage of people that volunteer for their sport. There is a clear degradation in voluntary work. The one thing that surprises me is, that this is not so with InterShoot. Tens of volunteers line up every year to offer their service for one, two or more days in order to ensure that the competitors can shoot their matches. This is something I am very proud of. Without these fantastic people it would not be possible to do what we can do now. From here I would like to pay my compliments for so much effort.

Without wanting to ignore any others, I would like to express my gratitude to four volunteers from (almost) the first hour. These are John Speetjens, Martin Finkelnberg, Ronald de Vos en Willy ten Bosch. They are responsible for the entire operational execution of InterShoot. Without them it would not have been possible to complete the 25 years. They have always new ideas, solutions or other approaches to allow everything to proceed smoothly.