Sad IPSC rifle match

Yesterday I was shooting IPSC rifle match in Hodonice, Czech Republic. This match was part of Czech national championship, CNC. It consists one handgun, one shotgun and one rifle match. This rifle match is mostly short to medium range targets, so it is rather fast and dynamic. Only 4 stages (3, 7, 12 and 13) include some longer range shooting and/or smaller targets. I made some mistakes on this match, some stages went good. Especially stage 12 (longest range) went particularly good for me.

So why "sad" match?


There was a very strange incident. On stage nr. 3 - one of 2 longest, highest scoring stages and probably second most difficult stage I suddenly could not hit mini poppers on some 50m off hand. Then, when stage was scored, I found that I had 5(!) misses. All on more distant targets (A4 format targets were used). After stage, I was thinking what happened. I started to inspect my rifle and then I saw, that my scope windage turret was off by almost  3 mrad (15 clicks). That much off can not happen accidentally, I checked this. But it is exactly amount of change when grabbing turret for one fast hand movement.

When I told about that to friends from my squad, one of them, who had particularly bad run on this stage checked his red dot sights (with open turrets). His sight windage was also way off. When not shooting, all rifles were standing on the racks. People were coming and going all the time. Looks like somewhere during lunch break, after stage 13/12 and before stage 3 (stages 1 and 2 were short range with big targets, so error would be small) someone had idea to mess with some rifles. Why? I have no slightest idea. For some sick sense of "fun"? To gain something? Because someone does not like us? Who knows. But it is very sad when things like that happen between shooters. In my case this incident cost me around 15 places or more. But more importantly it spoiled most of fun from the match.