EVENT REPORT
AIRSOFT SURGEON CHAMPIONSHIP 2020
negotiations with FRL Media, it was settled
– the Airsoft Surgeon Championship 2020
would be held right alongside (and as an
integral part of) The Great British Shooting
Show 2020!
…and that is how, after many months
of very hard graft and a huge effort by
a brilliant team of people, at just after
12am, on the 12th of February, I found
myself standing in the empty vastness of
Hall 9, at the National Exhibition Centre, in
Birmingham, England!
CUTTING IT CLOSE
Airsoft Surgeon Championships was partly
responsible for that growth. The event
also moved venue from The Grange, first
to Strikeforce Airsoft in Gloucester and
then, having taken a break in 2018 for
the World Shoot in Hong Kong, to FPS
on the Isle of Wight last year. However,
as good as each of those venues were –
and the competitions at all of them were
excellent – after the splendour of the
World Shoot we wanted to “raise the bar”,
so Chris Kong and I set about looking for a
suitable venue. This proved to be a bigger
challenge than either of us thought it
would be. With some venues shying away
from “shooting” and others concerned
about potential damage, it wasn’t until a
chance meeting in the Press Room at IWA
in 2019 that things really started moving.
FRL MEDIA
You might not know the name but FRL
Media are the company behind both
“War and Peace” and “The Great British
Shooting Show” and while in the IWA
Press Room I ended up chatting to FRL
Media’s Steve Morgan, where the subject
of the difficulties we were having finding a
venue came up. The British Shooting Show
is held at the NEC and almost jokingly, I
quipped that “maybe we could run the
championship alongside the Shooting
Show?” Imagine my utter astonishment
when Steve said “Why not? I’ll ask the
Boss!”
Back in the UK and following (it has
to be said) some pretty straightforward
The only way we were going to make a
success of the event, was to have a team
of people who knew what they were doing
and had the skills and determination to
make it happen. We were very fortunate
that Tim Wyborn, from Xsite Airsoft and
Xsite Practical Shooting Club, said he
would take on the job of designing the
required twenty stages, ably helped and
assisted by his sons, Matt and Paul. If
you are involved in the UK airsoft Trade,
you may also know Tim, as he works for
iWholesales and all three are excellent
Action Air shooters, having won many
trophies between them. Tim also happens
to be the UKPSA (United Kingdom Practical
Shooting Association, the governing body
for IPSC in Great Britain) “Action Air
National Squad Director”, so we knew that
all the stages would be both challenging
and to IPSC standards. Tim also brought
John Thompson onto the team, who
designed and built the electronic timing
units and ran the “Stats Office” during the
match.
Meanwhile, Chris Kong and I had the
job of building all the partitions (walls)
and barriers for the stages, a job that took
far, far longer than we expected and we
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