When Nick Mowrer competed at the Olympic Games London 2012, he was a recent college graduate and the youngest guy in the men’s free pistol field at age 23.
Eight years later he’s set to return, this time competing in air pistol as a husband, a father to a toddler and a sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Mowrer, now 31, of Butte, Montana, led after the first stage of the 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials for Airgun back in December and held on to that spot as the trials concluded with competition on Tuesday and Wednesday at Fort Benning, Georgia.
With an overall top score of 2,328 points, Mowrer claimed one of the two quota spots for the U.S. Joining him on the 2020 Olympic team will be James Hall, who finished second with 2,295 points. Hunter Battig and Anthony McCollum were just behind and will serve as replacement athletes.
Mowrer, whose silver medal at the Pan American Games Lima 2019 earned the U.S. its second of two Olympic quotas in men’s air pistol, has been among the top Americans in the sport for a decade.
A four-time aggregate collegiate pistol champion, he finished second in free pistol at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in 2012, beating out 2008 Olympian Brian Beaman to make the team. In London he just missed a shoot-off for the last spot in the final and finished 15th overall.
He was in the hunt to return to the Olympics in 2016 but fell short of making the team. One year later Mowrer and his wife, Tiffany, welcomed daughter Jeanice Lee in June 2017.
Unlike many shooters, who specialize in just one discipline, Mowrer is highly accomplished not only in pistol but also in rifle, and he’s the only American to have reached the world cup podium in both.
It was Hall who secured that first U.S. quota spot in air pistol, which he did by virtue of his winning gold at the Championship of the Americas in November 2018 in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Hall then declined his invitation to compete at the Pan American Games this past summer so that a teammate could try to win a second quota spot for the U.S.
Mowrer got it, and now Hall will fill that spot.
Hall, a native of Anniston, Alabama, had to mount a big comeback in the second stage of the Olympic trials after entering this week in sixth place.
The 36-year-old Hall has only been competing on the elite international scene since 2018, and he made his world championships debut that year. He’s also competed in five world cups, with his best finish being 20th in air pistol at a 2018 event in Guadalajara.
Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.
