This Shooter’s No Underdog

It’s just another nondescript building in an industrial park wedged between the freeway and train tracks in Laguna Niguel. A transmission place is next door. An auto body shop is across the driveway.

Olympic training site? Not likely, unless demolition derby is the newest Olympic sport. But in the parking lot there is a sign posted outside the building: “Attention: Do Not Expose or Handle Firearms in the Parking Lot.”

The building houses an indoor shooting range. Bill Demarest, U.S. Olympian, trains here.

“It’s kind of lonely here on the range,” Demarest said.

Recreational shooters and law enforcement agents practice here. The U.S. shooting team does not, except for Demarest. Many of his teammates practice at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs or, if they’re in the armed forces, at Fort Benning, Ga.

It’s lonely in Laguna Niguel, and costly too. Unlike his teammates in Colorado and Georgia, Demarest pays for food and housing. And, although the Olympic competition in free pistol, one of his two events, takes place on a 50-meter outdoor range, Demarest trains at this 25-yard indoor range.

He wouldn’t think of leaving. His job is here, working for Boeing in Long Beach, ensuring planes comply with design specifications and federal regulations. His family is here. He happily shuttles his daughter, Breana, 10, to dance class, and sometimes to the range. His ex-wife and her fiance helped him move into a Lake Forest condominium.

So Demarest, 35, trains for the Olympics, the world’s foremost sporting event, without coaches or teammates to cheer him on, chew him out or catch a flaw in his technique.

“It’s tough. I have to be my own coach,” he said. “It’s very tiring to get up at 3:45 a.m., go to work, then tell yourself you have to go train when you have a headache.

“Then you’re discouraged because your scores aren’t as high as you like, and you need to go running. It’s tough to motivate yourself every day. I have to be my own sports psychologist.”

Cue the music, for this sounds like the heart-tugging stories that American TV often offers in place of actual Olympic competition: Meet Bill Demarest, devoted father, pays his own way to train, shoots alone, the Olympic spirit reflected in a man trying his best to master an obscure sport in which he has no chance to win a medal . . .

Terrific script, but put away the hankies. Demarest might bring home a medal from Sydney. At the recent World Cup event in Italy, he set a world record in free pistol. At a 1998 World Cup event in Argentina, he placed fourth in air pistol. (No explosives or bullets are used in an air pistol, which uses compressed air to fire pellets.)

In both events, Demarest said, any of at least a dozen competitors could win. He set his world record by nine-tenths of a point. So the margin for gold could be one point, that one shot that pierces a bull’s-eye no bigger than an eraser on the end of a pencil.

The slightest twitch could throw off his shot just enough to lose a medal. That explains why he incorporates running and cycling into his training routine for a sport in which he does not take a single step while competing.

“I have to keep my heart rate as low as I can possibly keep it,” Demarest said. “Your heart is beating. Your intestines are pushing food around. I’m trying to contain all my movement. This is not simple.”

That’s reassuring, in a way, since the USA Shooting web site encourages would-be Olympians and other visitors that, “with members of the National Shooting Team ranging in age from 15 to over 50, it’s never too late (or too early) to start down the Road to the Olympics.”

Gee, I always wanted to be an Olympian, so I’ll just sign up here . . .

“You aren’t going to go from being a couch potato to an Olympic athlete in a year,” Demarest said. “It’s just not going to happen.”

Demarest occasionally shot rifles and BB guns as a child, but he devoted his competitive energies to baseball, soccer, running and cycling. He shot a rifle in the Marine Corps too, but he picked up a pistol in 1991, when he had too much free time while testing planes for McDonnell-Douglas in Yuma, Ariz.

“At the time, I didn’t know it was an Olympic event,” he said. “My wife had said, ‘Why don’t you get involved with something?’ and all the other guys were buying guns and shooting in the desert.”

He qualified for his first national championships in 1993. He made his first national team in 1997 and won his first national title last year, in air pistol.

“I’m just a baby in the sport,” he said. “I’ve only been on the international circuit for three years. Some of the people I’m competing against have been on the circuit 12 to 15 years.”

Demarest can do that, and probably will. Speed and strength may fade with age, but he competes in a sport that emphasizes neither.

To some, the Sydney Olympics represent a final, triumphant step in an athletic career. To Demarest, the Sydney Olympics represent a steppingstone.

“I want to continue to be able to establish world records,” he said. “I didn’t get into the sport because of the Olympics. I got into the sport because I enjoy it. When I stop enjoying it, I’ll find something else.

“But I would like to be a four-time Olympian.”