2026 F-Class World Championships – Final Day of Individual Competition
The final day of the individual competition at the 2026 F-Class World Championships was held on August 13th. The day consisted of two relays at 1,000 yards, with 20 shots for score in each relay.
The day started hot and only got hotter. Shade, if you were lucky enough to find some, offered only minimal relief. Extra water was quickly consumed throughout the day, and any water left in our shooting carts soon reached about the same temperature as a hot beverage. At that point, nobody really cared—we were drinking it as fast as we could get it.
Both relays were incredibly tricky. The intense heat played havoc with the mirage at the targets, while the flags could change quickly and the relentless sun beat down on the shooters on the firing line. There was also a lot of unexpected vertical showing up on the targets.
There were an unusually high number of scoring challenges throughout the day. Typically, a shooter will challenge a shot when everything appears to be going well and then, without any obvious significant change in conditions, the next score appears on the target much farther from the expected point of impact.
There was plenty of discussion on the firing line about target marking throughout the day. The markers in the butts were also working in extremely difficult conditions and suffering through the same intense heat. With hundreds of competitors shooting and targets being pulled and marked manually, mistakes did happen, and there seemed to be more scoring challenges than we would normally expect.
It certainly provided plenty of discussion about the advantages of electronic scoring, particularly at an event of this size where several hundred competitors have travelled from around the world to compete.
Then again, considering the heat we experienced that day, electronic scoring might have presented its own challenge. I suspect there would have been a fair number of tablets overheating on the firing line!
That brings the individual portion of the 2026 F-Class World Championships to an end. Next up is one final team practice day, followed by two days of team competition on August 15th and 16th.
Now the focus shifts completely to the World Team Championships.
