This Olympic Shooter Has a Right to Bear Gummy Bears

WSJ ^ | 27 July 2021 | Andrew Beaton

[DUMBGRUNT]

“I do eat quite a bit of sugar right before I shoot,” she says.

Tucker is a 20-year-old American silver medalist here who has become one of the fastest rising stars in rifle shooting while breaking one of the sport’s biggest taboos. She hypes herself up on candy exactly when she’s not supposed to.

It isn’t especially difficult to understand why shooters abstain from caffeine and sugar when they compete. They’re vices that can make people jittery. That’s a potential disaster for people who need to handle a gun with pinpoint precision.

...“A typical rifle shooter would look at you and have a coronary,”

Tucker has the best reason possible not to cut it out. It’s one of the habits that has suddenly turned her into one of the best shooters on the planet.

...the military academy where she attended high school in Florida had a team that piqued her interest. The 16-year-old Tucker joined, and she remembers how good she was compared to her teammates. “I was the worst,” she says.

College shooting was the next boon to her career because it gave her 24/7 access to a range. She’d shoot, go to class, and shoot some more. It added up to about seven hours a day, six days a week, she says, enough to satiate her voracious appetite to practice.

[fightin kentuckian]

Interesting. A popular test taking strategy in college is to have some caffeine prior to the test to make the nervous system more responsive. No reason something similar can’t work with other types of tests.