London surgeon who has just become the world’s best marksman

Gareth CorfieldTue, July 28, 2026 at 7:01 AM UTC

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Parag Patel is carried from the Stickledown range after his King’s Prize success - Jamie Lorriman for The Telegraph

As he lined up his rifle’s sights, took a final glance at the wind flags and gently squeezed the trigger, Parag Patel’s mind was clear of all distractions. Even as his winning shot pierced the bullseye, he had no idea he had just won the world’s most prestigious prize for marksmanship.

On Saturday, the London surgeon secured the top spot in one of the oldest continuously held amateur sporting competitions in Britain: the National Rifle Association’s annual Imperial Meeting.

For 157 years the NRA has awarded a prize given in the name of the ruling monarch to the top scorer in its flagship three-stage knockout competition – and the Kingston-based ear, nose and throat specialist, who previously won it in 2017, had just become the first ever winner of both the Queen’s and the King’s Prize.

“I just thought to myself, I’ve just got to make a decision and fire a shot. I couldn’t wait. I didn’t want to wait,” Patel told Telegraph Sport afterwards, fighting to be heard over the cheers of the crowd and the strains of See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes! from the marching band who paraded him atop a sedan chair into the NRA’s headquarters.

A marching band leads the way as Patel is carried into the NRA’s headquarters - Jamie Lorriman for The Telegraph

To watch this tall, easy man brushing aside the whims of Zephyrus, the old Greek wind god, by putting bullet after bullet into a circle the size of a traffic sign positioned half a mile away, is to observe the pinnacle of a sporting fixture dating back nearly 160 years.

Constructed in 1880, the NRA’s Bisley Camp base in Surrey is where Patel and hundreds of others duked it out over a week of fierce shoulder-by-shoulder competition. Bisley’s longest range, Stickledown, is home to the challenge that has attracted generations of precision marksmen from around the world: its fierce, fickle and ever-changing winds.

Target Rifle (TR), the shooting discipline in which Patel out-shot 750 others (including his 18-year-old son, Aaron) consists of firing single-shot rifles at black circle targets between 300 and 1,000 yards away. Competitors lie on their stomachs for maximum accuracy. The challenge is not just beating your rivals, but in mastering the wind and the weather. Hot July sun is just as much of a challenge as a howling gale and the knowledge that several world champions are firing alongside you.

Competitors take part in the King’s Prize final - Jamie Lorriman for The Telegraph

Under TR’s rules, sniper-style telescopes are forbidden: everyone uses so-called iron sights, just like the Winter Olympics’ biathlon competitors – although the cross-country skiers shoot over a distance 18 times shorter than that of the Bisley marksmen.

At the longest distance, a gentle breeze of 10mph will blow a 7.62mm bullet eight feet sideways, like how an off-centre bowling alley ball gets further and further away from the pins. This is a real problem when the difference between a perfect bullseye and a complete miss, scoring zero, is only five feet.

By watching and calculating how the wind blows across the range, the shooter must cancel out that tendency for the bullet to drift sideways. It resembles how cricketer Shane Warne’s legendary spin-bowling placed the ball well off to the side of the wicket before gracefully spinning it into the stumps.

At the longest distance a breeze can blow a bullet eight feet sideways - Jamie Lorriman for The Telegraph

Valentina Churchouse, who at 16 was the youngest competitor in this year’s King’s final – like Patel, she too fought her way through two qualifying rounds to be among the last 100 competing for the prize – explained the challenge.

“I shot a V-bull [dead centre of the bullseye], made a 3½-minute wind change, and got another V in the same spot,” the Wellington College pupil beamed, describing how she adjusted her rifle to move the bullet’s impact by the equivalent of a full metre, just to keep it in the centre of the target and beat that ever-gusting wind.

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Teenager Valentina Churchouse was the youngest competitor at Bisley - Jamie Lorriman for The Telegraph

Uniquely in competitive sports, teenagers in the shooting sports compete on a fully level playing field regardless of age or sex. Sometimes they beat the grizzled old veterans, causing endless grumbling as decades of accumulated wisdom and experience is bested by youthful optimism and the luck of the newcomer.

A six-week festival of shooting, the Imperial Meeting is the annual championships of each of the eight shooting disciplines run by the NRA. It opens with the Civilian Service Rifle competition, where owners of Second World War-vintage Lee Enfields rub shoulders with the very best in precision rifle technology, and – via the dedicated Youth Imperial, which alone boasts 250 U25 entrants – it culminates in the week-long Target Rifle event.

The King fires one of the rifles which are now on display in the NRA Museum - Jamie Lorriman for The Telegraph

“Well over a million shots are fired” during the full programme, says Peter Cottrell, the NRA’s head of shooting and training and who serves as the match director for the Imperial.

“Two thousand competitors in total over that period,” he adds. A living, breathing encyclopedia of shooting, Cottrell can rattle off the length of the range danger area (“four thousand metres”) as readily as he knows the oldest rivalry in the sport: “That was England and Scotland in 1862, the Elcho Shield. It was presented by the Earls of Wemyss and March and they still come across to the match today.”

Woven into Bisley’s history is also this very newspaper. In 1960 TheTelegraph presented the NRA with a trophy to mark the association’s centenary and it has been contested in each of the subsequent 66 years. This year’s winner was an American, the first to do so this century.

A retired US Army officer, Curtis Bohlman Jr is as tall as he is slow-spoken; this bearded Oklahoma colonel picks his words as carefully as he fires his shots, yet his smiling self-deprecation would put any English gentleman to shame.

Curtis Bohlman celebrates with the Daily Telegraph Challenge Cup - Jamie Lorriman for The Telegraph

“I’m on the verge of being a good shooter, I have peaks and I have valleys,” he says. When handed the 12-inch sterling silver Daily Telegraph Challenge Cup, he unbends far enough to add: “I’ve been congratulated by so many people that it’s starting to get real for me.”

The NRA of the UK is no relation to the American gun rights organisation, which the name some 11 years after Queen Victoria bestowed her royal charter upon the British sporting body in 1860. Yet transatlantic relations are warm, with US teams visiting Bisley every summer to take home as much silverware as they can.

Sam Frost, the NRA’s youth development manager and an accomplished international competitor herself at just 21 years of age, explained the team matches that take place before the King’s final.

“We have Kenya, Germany, the USA, Australia. We also then have Guernsey, Jersey. Did I say Canada? Maybe. And then Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales, and they’re all shooting with a 12-man team, plus coaches, captains, adjutants, plotters. It’s really a large affair,” she said, gesturing at a festive fluttering of flags behind the firing point.

NRA secretary-general Simon Lee, who took post last year, observes from the association’s Victorian red-brick HQ: “The challenge is to keep that charm and tradition and culture, but also take it forward and modernise and improve. There are challenges that need to be addressed here, but people like the old-fashioned nature of Bisley.”

As Patel is herded out of the NRA offices for the traditional King’s Prize celebrations of a drink in every notable clubhouse at Bisley (of which there are well over a dozen), one thing is plain: between the history, the tradition and the eternal fight for glory, rifle shooting truly is a sport like no other.

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Source: “AOL Sports”