NC State junior rifle shooter Lucas Kozeniesky positions his feet perpendicular to his body, places his air rifle in his right shoulder pocket, rests his cheek on the weld and steadies himself as he aims through his glasses at his target at the practice range inside Broughton Hall.
Being a shooter since high school, Kozeniesky has performed this routine thousands of times, and he will again in August, only this time on the biggest stage in the world — the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Despite having a Marine colonel father and a family history of military service, shooting wasn’t something he grew up with and it certainly didn’t come as naturally to Kozeniesky as one would think it would to an Olympian.
In fact, it all began for Kozeniesky when his parents told him to pick a sport to get involved in while in high school. He settled on rifle simply because it looked “interesting,” but his early results were subpar to say the least.
“At the end of my freshman year of high school, I was the worst shooter on my team,” Kozeniesky said. “So I said, ‘I’m going to get better at this. I like this. This is neat and it’s a unique sport, and I want to do better at it.’”
Get better, he did. So much better he’s less than two months away from competing for an Olympic medal in the 10-meter air rifle event, which consists of shooting a series of 60 shots at a target the size of a period at the end of a sentence, while standing up and 10 meters (roughly 33 feet) away.
In addition to spending four hours a night in Broughton Hall, repeatedly firing off shots to improve his skills to an Olympic caliber, Kozeniesky has invested heavily into the idea of mental management and attributes much of his success to it.
“Mental management is organizing yourself to perform at a higher level consistently,” Kozeniesky said. “I list a goal, I list how I’m going to do it and I list the things I’m going to achieve while getting there.”
To achieve his ultimate goal, Kozeniesky stays focused on the here and now, and doesn’t get ahead of himself which helps to keep pressure off himself and reduce anxiety.
“A better way to describe it would be: If you’re driving down the road, and you’re trying to get off on exit 100 and you’re at mile one, you’re not thinking about turning right up to that exit until you’re close to it,” Kozeniesky said. “You’re thinking about staying in your lane, you’re looking around at people in your mirrors, you’re looking at driving well, you’re looking at the people in your car making sure they’re safe. You’ve got to get off to get gas, you’ve got to get back on to get to your goal.”
Kozeniesky qualified for one of only two available spots on the U.S. Olympic men’s rifle team June 5 at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Camp Perry, Ohio by finishing first in the men’s air rifle competition, beating out some of the top male and female marksmen in the country by a sizeable margin.
“At the Olympic Trials, that was when I peaked at my performance,” Kozeniesky said. “All the training I did leading up to the event was to peak at that time, to have my best performance on those days. It didn’t really hit me how well I was doing until maybe the last 10 shots of the match when everyone was looking at me, and it was like ‘wow, I really just did this.’”
After becoming the first Olympian in NC State rifle history, Kozeniesky hopes to become the first American to ever medal since air rifle became an Olympic sport in 1984. While other countries from around the world tend to dominate Olympic shooting competitions, don’t tell Kozeniesky’s head coach Keith Miller the rising senior has no chance.
“Sure, I’ve seen [a shooter make the podium when not expected to] at different levels,” Miller said. “Why not this level?”
