New Zealand shooter Michael Johnson has come away from the world para shooting championships in Changwon, South Korea, with two silver medals, the second of them settled by one tenth of a point.
Johnson, who is 52 and shoots out of Waiuku, south of Auckland, scored 254.6 points in the final of the R5 mixed 10m air rifle prone SH2 event. Serbia’s Dragan Ristic beat him by 0.1. Johnson’s last shot of the final was worth 10.5 points and Ristic’s was worth 10.4, but the Serbian had enough of a buffer built up to hold on, RNZ reported.
“I’m feeling exhausted. It’s been a full-on competition but making the R5 final was exceptional and exciting,” Johnson said in a Paralympics New Zealand statement. Describing the last shot, he said he knew he needed to take his time, “but you still feel rushed because the other competitors have taken their final shot and I only had 30 seconds”.
The margin mattered for more than the medal colour. Winning the R5 final would have delivered New Zealand a quota place for the Los Angeles 2028 Paralympic Games. Second place did not. Those places are awarded to countries rather than to individual athletes, and only a limited number are handed out at a world championships, so missing one by a tenth of a point is an expensive near miss.
Johnson’s first silver of the week came in the R4 mixed 10m air rifle standing SH2 event on Thursday, where he shot an Oceania record 254.1 in the eight-shooter final, including four maximum scores of 10.9. That result was his sixth world championships podium finish, and it came almost exactly 20 years after he won his first world championships medal in the same event. It also closed the book on a bad memory from the previous world championships in Lima three years ago, where a rifle malfunction left him 21st in R4 qualification.
“It’s exciting and a real comeback after what happened in Lima,” Johnson said in a Paralympics New Zealand statement after that final. He also said the heat in Changwon suited him, describing the conditions as “quite hot, which was a good indicator my body was preparing itself”.
The two silvers take Johnson to seven world championships medals across two decades, among them the world titles he won in 2006 and 2010. He has been to six Paralympic Games, starting with Athens in 2004, where he won gold. He has also won two Paralympic bronze medals, and has competed at Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024.
That tally of six Games equals the New Zealand record set by the swimmer and athlete Graham Condon, who competed at six Paralympics between 1968 and 1988. If Johnson makes it to Los Angeles in 2028 he will hold the record outright as the most-selected New Zealand Paralympian.
Johnson came to the sport late and by accident. He sustained a spinal cord injury in a motor accident at the age of 22, resulting in quadriplegia, and finished a degree in information systems while recovering. In his late twenties he picked up a Parafed Auckland brochure, found shooting on it, and started competing in 2001 at the Ardmore National Shooting Complex. Three years later he was a Paralympic champion, an outcome his Paralympics New Zealand profile records that he found surprising at the time.
He is classified SH2C, coaches himself, and trains on a range at his own property. He is a former president of Parafed Auckland and spends a good deal of time working with newer shooters. “I don’t hide any secrets and I pass on my knowledge freely,” he says in that profile. He has also said the appeal of the sport is that “it is one of the few sports which integrates both able bodied with disability”.
Johnson made a point of naming the two people who travelled with him. “I’m proud and excited and super stoked for my support team of Sonja Bencina, the team manager, and Janelle McGirr the loader,” he said. A loader is a required part of SH2 shooting, where athletes who cannot support the weight of the rifle use a stand and need someone to load each round.
The championships ran from 7 to 16 September at the Changwon International Shooting Range and drew 324 shooters from 53 nations, including first-time entrants from Bhutan, Costa Rica and Iceland, according to the International Paralympic Committee. It is the third time Korea has hosted the event, after Seoul in 2002 and Cheongju in 2018. Korea topped the shooting medal table at the Paris Paralympics.
Johnson was one of three New Zealanders in Changwon. Neelam O’Neill of Auckland and Greg Reid of Lower Hutt both shot the R3 mixed 10m air rifle prone SH1 event on 12 September, with O’Neill also contesting the P2 women’s 10m air pistol SH1 the same day. Reid has been to the Rio and Paris Games. O’Neill made her Paralympic debut in Paris and spent most of this year rebuilding after left wrist surgery in December for rheumatoid arthritis pain, an operation that was meant to take six to eight weeks to recover from and instead took about six months before she could shoot pistol again in May.
“It’s been a long and challenging road back, so this opportunity means even more to me,” O’Neill said when the team was named in August.
Qualification for Los Angeles runs on for another two years, through World Cup events and regional championships, so Changwon was a first opportunity rather than a last one. For Johnson, who has now been shooting internationally for a quarter of a century, it was also a reminder that he is still quick enough to make finals against fields three times the size of the ones he started out in.
Have you followed Michael Johnson’s career, or do you shoot yourself? Tell us what you make of his Changwon result in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job š
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