Matthew Coward-Holley
“A serious contender for a podium place”
As a Junior, Matt CowardHolley travelled the country collecting almost every award a young DTL shot can. However, he realised quickly that DTL could only take him so far. Intrigued by the fact that no one had ever scored a perfect 150 straight, Matt switched to what was then an Olympic discipline, Double Trap (DT). Before long, Matt was awarded a Double Trap Team Gold medal at the 2015 Lonato World Championships followed by a Double Trap bronze at the European Championships the following year. Unfortunately, DT was removed from the Olympic roster in 2018, but this did not slow Matt’s path to the top. He took the lessons he’d learned from DT and DTL and used them to master Olympic Trap (OT). In 2019, Matt claimed an OT silver medal and an Olympic quota place at the ISSF World Cup in Korea, before heading to the ISSF World Championships 2019 in Lonato where he dominated the competition and ended the event as Britain’s first ever OT World Champion.
Matt regularly joins forces with other world-class athletes for Team Trap events. In May, he joined fellow Team GB member Kirsty Hegarty at the ISSF World Cup in Lonato, where the pair claimed the gold medal. A few weeks later, Matt returned to Italy to claim another gold, this time at the Italian Open Green Cup. He then flew to Croatia for the European Championships where, after a well fought final, he claimed his title as European OT
Champion while also taking a Team Trap Silver with Charlotte Hollands.
Matthew walks into the Olympic stadium as World and European Champion. At the top of his game, he is a serious contender for a podium place.