2024 Olympics: Seonaid McIntosh’s journey to Paris

Her journey to reach this point has been a detour.

Natural – perhaps hereditary – talent has combined with hard work to overcome repeated health problems and establish McIntosh as one of the best in the world.

Before her sister’s successes, father Donald and mother Shirley were Commonwealth Games shooters themselves. It didn’t seem likely that Seonaid would follow in their path.

“We were never forced to film. Seonaid didn’t even want to do it for a long time,” Jen told BBC Sport.

“We’re quite similar and competitive, so that made board games interesting sometimes.

“She tells it like it is, and yet she was an old soul, she always had a plan, she was sometimes quite shy, sometimes a bit clumsy, but also very mature.”

That plan seemed to be a musical one. Like her sister, Seonaid went to Dollar Academy and joined the school pipe band, led by Craig Stewart.

And coincidentally, Stewart was also the coach of the school’s shooting team.

“Seonaid is not a big girl, but she carried a tenor drum with a circumference of 50 centimeters and tried to march to the rhythm of sturdy young men of 1.88 meters, with steps that resembled those of giraffes,” he recalls.

“She was right in the middle of the band, trying to keep up, but she never complained. She’s a fantastic musician – she also plays the drum kit – and was a world champion piper and drummer with us.”

Her talent was so great that at one point there was even talk of McIntosh attending prestigious music schools in the United States, her father Donald explained.

“Music was her thing and that was the path she was on for a long time,” he told BBC Sport.

However, it soon became clear that McIntosh had the potential to continue the family tradition on the shooting range.

Donald recalls that one day she decided to go to the Alloa and District club with the family, after “having done a bit of prone rifle practice at school”.

Within hours he was enthusiastically showing his friend and five-time Commonwealth Games shooter Robin Law the paper targets Seonaid had been aiming at.

“It was quickly apparent that something was wrong,” he says.

Former Scotland coach Sinclair Bruce agrees, recalling an earlier meeting with Seonaid at the Meadowbank shooting range.

“Shooting is full of young people who have it easy, but they don’t stick with it because they don’t have the work ethic,” Bruce said. “Seonaid was never like that.”

Add to that what Stewart affectionately calls her “bent” nature and her ability to listen and learn, and it became clear the family had another elite athlete at the dinner table.

McIntosh combined her studies, music and shooting for a while, but it wasn’t until she saw Jen compete in the London 2012 Olympics that she was convinced to prioritise the latter.

“She saw Olympic shooting in all its glory and thought, ‘I want to try that,’” Donald explains. “Pretty soon after that she said, ‘Dad, can I try 3P?’

“That required all kinds of equipment that we didn’t have, but I told her she could start with an air rifle, because I still had my old one at home. And she immediately got to work with it.”

Jen, busy chasing her own dreams of Olympic success, was unaware of the impact she had made. And unaware that her little sister was quickly “surpassing pretty much everything I’ve ever accomplished.”

Medals of all colours followed at world, European and Commonwealth level, but these trinkets are only part of Seonaid’s remarkable story.

During her rise to the top of her sport, the 28-year-old has battled arthritis and Crohn’s disease, and last year she admitted in an interview with BBC Sport that she struggled with her mental health during the Covid lockdowns.

“She never gave in to it,” Donald says. “She developed arthritis in her knees and spent much of her senior year of school on crutches while doctors tried to figure out what was wrong.

“There was talk of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which would go away, but that didn’t work out so well. The next two or three years she tried to shoot internationally, but she had a very hard time with it because she kept having flare-ups.

“She also probably has Crohn’s disease, which comes and goes and which put her in hospital in Egypt for the 2022 World Championships, and some other things, which is causing her a lot of pain.

“That’s pretty much her daily life and these kinds of things come and go for no apparent reason.

“Sometimes it’s hard to stay positive when things like this hit you so hard, but she’s learned to persevere and keep going.”

No one admires Jen more than I do.

She knows how difficult it is to perform at the highest level in sports, even without the health problems her little sister is struggling with.

“It was really hard for a long time because there was a lot of uncertainty before she got the diagnosis,” Jen said. “But once she got it, she was like, ‘Well, this is what I have and I’m going to deal with it.’

“In many ways, she almost keeps going despite everything because she doesn’t want to let it hold her back. It’s really incredible to see.”