Hijack hero wins new admirers as Games’ oldest competitor
Shooter Robert Pitcairn is making history at 79, 44 years after saving the lives of 130 people
Robert Pitcairn is a touch hard of hearing and requires, on occasion, a gentle hand to help him negotiate the steeper inclines of Belmont shooting range, a verdant, windblown expanse here on the outskirts of Brisbane. But these are the only outward signs of Anno Domini offered by perhaps the most remarkable competitor the Commonwealth can conjure.
In two months’ time, this kindly Canadian, a former pilot with more than 24,000 hours of flying behind him, turns 80. And yet in both the distances from which he primed his full-bore rifle yesterday, he was the top scorer.
Already the oldest athlete in the history of the Games, Pitcairn is also the only one ever to have thwarted an aircraft hijacking. While he is celebrated in Canada as a demon shot, with several of his international trophies displayed at the national sports hall of fame in Calgary, his venerable status in his homeland derives largely from an act of heroism he performed 44 years ago, shortly after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
On Nov 29, 1974, Canadian Pacific flight 71 took off from Montreal to Edmonton, with Pitcairn in the cockpit. Among the 130 passengers was Naim Djemal, a Turkish Cypriot who lived in Winnipeg and demanded that the Boeing 737 be re-routed to Cyprus, where he planned to avenge the deaths of his two brothers in the conflict. Djemal attacked Lena Madsen, the smallest member of the crew, holding a blade to her throat and striking her repeatedly with the knife.
Somehow, Pitcairn remained poised, even though he had completed his training for hijack situations just two days earlier. He told Djemal he would take the plane to Saskatoon, refuel, and then carry on according to orders. Instead, he returned to the controls and arranged for police to intercept the plane on the tarmac and arrest Djemal, who received an eight-year prison sentence.
“I felt sorry for my crew,” he reflects, under pristine Australian skies. “They were deeply traumatised by it. I wore it fairly well. Being captain, you have to take responsibility, it’s your job. But the lady who was hurt by him, she never flew again. That’s the tragic part of it. I wish I could do it over again and not have it happen.”
Pitcairn wears both his vintage and his valour lightly. For the crowd here, he is a clear favourite simply for turning up in almost his ninth decade. He is compelling proof that the Commonwealths are the true ‘Generation Games’, where Wales’ Anna Hursey can line up in table tennis aged 11 and where a shooter can shine despite being born before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Mixed zones in these settings are usually fraught, frenetic places, with athletes either delirious or sullen in the aftermath of battle. Pitcairn, though, shows the benefit of his life’s exotic tapestry in that he stays firmly on a level.
“I’ve transferred all the skills I learnt in planes into shooting,” he says. “In both, it’s about mental management. If you have a bad shot, you have to get rid of it.”
Pitcairn applied this principle with aplomb yesterday, receiving the highest scores from both 900 and 1,000 yards, even though he and his partner Nicole Rossignol, a policewoman from Quebec City, could manage only eighth overall in the Queen’s prize pairs, a quaint throwback where the winners are still carried to the ceremony by sedan chair. He fell in love with shooting while a cadet for the Royal Canadian Air Force and has since perfected the art by hunting sheep, deer and moose.
“I started shooting in 1960, and by 1965 I had won a competition with 1,600 entrants,” he says.
He feels a deep relationship with Australia, having flown DC-8S from Vancouver to Sydney on convoluted trans-pacific routes via Hawaii and Fiji, and could have emigrated here in the late Sixties.
Instead, he brought up his family in Canada, where his renown endures as the man whose courage under fire helped save the lives of 130 people. “It comes up quite a bit,” he says, with some understatement. “We have only had two hijackings in Canadian history.” Now, he is drawing attention as an older gentleman in the crucible of sporting youth.
But Pitcairn claimed his place entirely on merit, beating more than 1,000 other aspirants to make the grade for Gold Coast. The one pang of regret is that these Games might be his last, with shooting as yet unconfirmed for Birmingham 2022. “I had wanted to be there with my son, Donald,” he says. “He had been training hard for it.”
Should it not come to pass, Pitcairn can rest easy that he has inspired legions of admirers to believe their lives still have more chapters to be written.