Gary Anderson Receives the Award of the Olympic Order

Former USA Shooting President and two-time Olympic gold medalist Gary Anderson (Oak Harbor, Ohio) was awarded the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Olympic Order in November 2012.

International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) President and IOC member Olegario Vazquez Raña had the honor to award the IOC Olympic Order to Anderson during ISSF Meetings taking place in Alcapulco, Mexico, on behalf of IOC President Jacques Rogge.

The Olympic Order is the highest award of the IOC and was created in May 1975 as a successor to the Olympic Certificate. The Olympic Order is awarded to individuals for distinguished contributions to the Olympic Movement. The Olympic Order insignia resembles a collar with the five Olympic rings framed by olive branches.

“Gary Anderson has devoted his life to sport, both as an athlete and as a sports administrator in the USA and at the International Shooting Sport Federation,” said Raña. “He has placed his knowledge and experience as an elite athlete at the service of sports administration.” 

Anderson was a member of the USA Shooting Team for 10 years (1959-1969) and earned two Olympic gold medals in Tokyo (1964) and Mexico City (1968). He also claimed seven World Championship medals, two Pan American Games titles and 16 National Championship titles to go along with six individual World Records in his career.

Anderson served USA Shooting as President from 2009-2013. At the international level, he joined the international shooting family in 1978 as member of the ISSF Administrative Council, and is now serving the international federation in his role as Vice President.

Anderson served as the Director of the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) from 1999 to 2009. In addition to promoting firearms safety training and rifle practice for all shooters, Anderson's primary focus at CMP was to develop and sustain successful youth shooting programs at both regional and national levels.

A former Nebraska state senator, Anderson previously worked at the NRA where he served as Executive Director of General Operations. Gary was responsible for the development of safety, training and competition programs. Among hundreds of other honors, Gary was awarded the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice (NBPRP) Distinguished International Shooting Badge (Serial number one) in April 1963 by President John F. Kennedy. While at the NRA, Anderson served on the NBPRP board, and was one of the first people to advocate and pioneer a shift in priorities to youth and junior shooting. As a result of this shift, Anderson became the founding and administrative director of the U. S. Shooting Team Foundation. 

In 1993, he moved to Atlanta to become the Shooting Competitions Manager for the 1996 Olympic Games. In 1996, Anderson accepted a position with Fulton County Georgia, to manage the Wolf Creek Shooting Venue, a facility destined to become a premier national and international center for the shooting sports.

Anderson’s influence on shooting sports extends well beyond the United States. He has traveled extensively throughout his career in shooting, serving as a genuine ambassador for shooting sports, attending 12 Olympic Games, three as a competitor and nine as technical delegate or a jury member. He is also the recipient of one of only five prestigious honorary memberships to the historic and renowned shooting club, Hauptschutzengesellschaft, in Munich, Germany.
(story reprinted by permission of USAS)

Dry Firing Through the Kitchen

The Anderson farmhouse around the time the Anderson children, Gary and Karen, were born.

Gary's childhood was spent in a typical Nebraska farmland house, standing on 160 acres of family land.   Two of the three bedrooms upstairs had no heat;  on a cold, wintry night frost would accumulate on the inside of the single-pane windows.    Gary and his sister Karen had the unheated bedrooms upstairs.  The heat for the lower floors came from the furnace in the crawl space through a large grate on the floor, measuring about 3' by 3'.   It was half in the kitchen and half in the living room.  Electricity was added by the Rural Electrification Act in 1948 when Gary was 9 years old and indoor plumbing was added when Gary was 15 years old.  During the hot summer months, Gary would sleep outdoors every night.

There was a large "mudroom/laundryroom" where Gary and his dad would reload.   This was a relatively warm room because of a space heater on the north wall.   Gary's sister remembers taking a bath in a round galvanized bathtub in this room before the house had electricity to heat water.  On the east wall there was a white metal medicine cabinet that became a storage place for Gary's meager ammunition supply.     On adhesive tape, he wrote "Warning AMMO" and stuck it on the medicine cabinet.     It stayed there for 40 years.

Gary spent hours dry firing by standing, kneeling, or lying in a corner of the living room and dry firing diagonally through the kitchen into the back room.      His sister, Karen, remembers this as a "pain the the neck" sometimes.     Every apartment we have rented or house we have purchased must have the required 10 meters (even if at a diagonal) for dry firing.    When Gary was in seminary, the couple living next to us (Dick and Evelyn Headen) knew us a long time before they realized Gary was dry firing just behind our common wall.

The farmhouse laundry room will become a significant story for my blog the day Gary won his second Gold Medal.     

An Article from the Archives

When Gary talks about getting his start in shooting, he always mentions an article in the American Rifleman by Anatoli Bogdanov of the USSR.  That was a time when USSR shooters were dominating international shooting competitions.  

We were able to find the article in an archive,  published in April 1955, entitled "The Training of the Target Shot."     The article was originally published in the Deutsche Schuetzenzeitung and translated by Col. E. H. Harrison USA (Ret'd) of the NRA staff.     The article was published about a year before Gary started any serious training, but when he did this became his primary inspiration and source of information about how much training was required to be a world class shooter.

In Gary's words:  The Bogdanov article is important because he became the only hero I have ever had.  He won two Olympic Gold medals and six World Championships in the 1950s.  He was the best rifle shooter in the world at that time and my goal was to better his record.  It is probably important to note that I began my serious training during my last year of high school and that Bogdanov was my inspiration and his record became my objective.  


I've never been back to Axtell HS to confirm this, but my memory is that towards the end of our senior year we (all 12 of us) were asked to list our ambitions, etc., for the school paper.  By then I had been training seriously for about a year.  I said my ambition was to become the "best rifle shooter in the world."  Clearly, no one took it seriously at the time, but....

It should also be noted that the Army Marksmanship Unit was formed in 1956.   Col. Tom Sharpe (reference "No Coach, No Team, No Money") and other officers provided the impetus to form the unit to bring America back to international shooting prominence, something that had not happened since the 1920s.

The Lost Letter.....

After graduation from Axtell (NE) High School in 1957, Gary enrolled in the University of Nebraska (Lincoln), joined ROTC, but only stayed two semesters.     He decided his best bet for top notch rifle training would be with the Army Marksmanship Unit at Fort Benning, GA.     He  had no idea how his scores would stack up against other shooters.

He wrote a letter to Commanding Officer of AMU, COL Tom Sharpe and reported his scores, asking for a tryout for the USAMU International Rifle Team.  But the team leaders did not believe his scores, thought he was lying. For some reason,  COL Sharpe decided to take a chance on Gary and wrote back telling him he would get a 90-day tryout with the unit after enlisting.    

Gary with Col. Sharpe c. 1964

After Basic Training at Ft. Carson, CO,  Gary arrived at AMU, but was nearly derailed with orders to The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California.    COL Sharpe was able to circumvent Gary's orders and get him to Ft. Benning for a 90 day tryout.    His tryout with the team started with dry firing for 30 days.  At the end of the 30 days he was asked to shoot 40 shots standing.     His score turned out to be the second best score of the day and resulted in a permanent assignment to the unit before his tryout was over.

Gary remembers the letter COL Sharpe wrote him.  To date we have not found this letter and fear it has disappeared from our hands.  It is significant because COL Sharpe's decision to give Gary a tryout with the Army Team in spite of the advice he was getting turned out to be one of the great turning points in the history of shooting.

No coach, no team, no money.....

Gary and Buddy

Gary grew up in rural Nebraska. His father taught him how to hunt and how to handle a rifle safely. This is where and how Gary was first exposed to rifles.

Gary's dad, Roy, had a subscription to The American Rifleman Magazine (circa 1950's--the height of the Cold War) with a few articles about the Russians who dominated the 1954 World Championships and 1956 Olympic Games.   Gary was inspired by an article written by Anatoli Bogdanov, the greatest rifle shooter in the world in the 1950's.   The article talked about the importance of dry firing, so Gary improvised and went to work.   This is where and how Gary's belly began to burn with the dream of becoming an Olympic Champion in target shooting.

A little boy on a big tractor!

Throwing bales on the farm

C. 1957 - The Nebraska farm boy learns to shoot

 Gary was 14 years old when he decided he was going to do something with the Anderson name. About the time he was a senior in high school (age 17) he started training. Without benefit of proper equipment, gear, a coach, a range, a manual, a team (or the Internet) Gary taught himself how to shoot, using an old H&R model 65. There wasn't enough money for ammunition so Gary dry fired -- meaning going through all the motions of firing a shot, but without bullets. Once a week Roy would give him enough money to buy one box of bullets to practice "live fire." At age 25 his name was called to the Gold Medal Podium for winning the 300meter Rifle competition at the Tokyo Olympics (1964).   But that was merely the beginning of his Olympic and World Championship career.     And there are many stories of the journey to Tokyo.