OLYMPICS: Kalispell's shooting star

Jamie Corkish’s stepson has a question for her.

“He’s like ‘don’t people know you here?’” Corkish said.

It’s a fair question, too, because Corkish, a 32-year-old retired former competitive shooter, should stick out in her adopted hometown of Kalispell. After all, she has something few other people on earth have ever earned: an Olympic gold medal.

Just over four years ago, competing as Jamie Gray, Corkish fired the last of 70 shots with her rifle in the 50-meter three-position rifle shooting competition and made history. Her gold medal winning score of 691.9 is an Olympic record.

The performance was the culmination of a lifelong pursuit that began in Lebanon, Pennsylvania and took her to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks to compete collegiately. In the year prior to her Olympic win she was the number one ranked shooter in the world.

Despite all she had achieved, in the finals of the three-position competition she was shooting for her first Olympic medal. She had come just short — finishing fourth and fifth — in a pair of Olympic events in 2008, and she had, in her words, “a disaster tryout” for the 2004 Games that cost her a spot on the team.

Standing, kneeling and prone — the three positions in the event — in London in 2012, Corkish was battling a lower back injury that would end her career a short time later. She was dealing, too, with the immense pressure that comes with competing in a sport that soars into the sporting consciousness only once every four years.

“The Olympics are always stressful,” Corkish said. “It’s one of the most stressful matches I think anyone can ever compete in.”

When the final shots pierced the target, Corkish had overcome all of it and fulfilled a dream.

“I set my whole life up, since the age of 15,” she said. “Making the Olympics and winning gold was a goal of mine. Being able to achieve that and go out with achieving that is definitely a benefit. It makes it a little easier, I think.”

Corkish and her husband, Mike, moved to Kalispell in 2013, not long after her competitive career ended. Mike and Jamie both work full-time for ELEY ammunition and the pair added to their family last month when Jamie gave birth to a son, Tristan. Mike’s two other children — Jamie’s stepchildren — are 11 and 18.

Cheerful and petite, Corkish doesn’t stick out in a crowd and she’s reticent to brag about her past. At a gun safety event in June, Corkish was billed as “Olympic Gold Medalist Jamie Corkish” but pulled the medal out of her briefcase only when a reporter asked about it after the event.

It was lucky, it turned out, that Corkish even had it on hand that day.

“Most of the time my husband has to tell me where it is,” she said. “I have no idea where I put that thing. Normally I have to search for it if I have to take it somewhere.”

That doesn’t mean that Corkish isn’t proud of her accomplishment.

“I love sharing [the medal] with kids, trying to encourage kids to follow their dreams because I was there one day, too,” she said. “I personally feel like the medal I won is for Team USA. It’s for the United States of America and so I share it with as many people as I can.”

Like much of the rest of the country, Corkish is planning to watch as much of the Rio Olympics as possible. She watched some of the early soccer matches and was gearing up to catch as many of her fellow shooters in action throughout the event.

Her experience as a viewer is a new and very different one than she’s used to, especially since she didn’t watch the opening ceremonies in either of her two Olympic years because of early morning competitions the next day.

“Some people are there to compete, some people are there to win and I was definitely one of those that wanted to put my time and energy into winning,” she said.

“You’re making a choice whether you’re going to bed at 9 o’clock to be able to feel fresh the next day or you go to bed at midnight because you’ve been involved in all these other Olympic events.”

Despite not having to worry about competing this year, Corkish has her hands full with a newborn baby at home.

There is, however, one fortuitous bit of timing.

“I’m a huge sports fan in general,” she said. “If I could just subscribe to the sporting channels on TV I’d be good to go.

“Especially being on maternity leave during the Olympics, I’ll be glued to the TV watching whatever I can watch.”