Rachel Tozier’s Olympic journey: ‘Doing great for a small-town farm girl out of Missouri’ (2024)

PATTONSBURG, Mo. — Army Staff Sgt. Rachel Tozier can’t remember ever seeing her stepfather, Monte Hoover, cry, but her mother told her there were tears in eyes when he learned in March that she’d qualified for the Summer Olympics.

“My mom (Dana) said he broke down in tears when he found out, so I think he knew that all of the money and time spent had paid off,” Tozier said.

Hoover was the first person to put a gun in Tozier’s hands 20 years ago.

Now, Tozier — who is stationed at Fort Moore, Georgia, as an instructor/shooter with the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit’s Shotgun Team — is ready to take aim at gold.

Tozier, a Pattonsburg, Missouri, native, will compete in the women’s trap shooting competition at the Paris Games, so we visited her in her hometown to find out how she became an Olympian.

“My stepdad decided he was going to build this trap when I was 12 because he shot sporting clays when he was young,” Tozier said. “He pretty much told me I was going to learn how to shoot and I was terrified. I was afraid of the recoil.”

Humble beginnings

Her stepfather, Monte Hoover, started Tozier with a BB gun and progressed to shotguns as the afternoon went along. Eventually, she was joining Hoover’s friends for their weekly Saturday night sporting-clay shoots on the family farm.

“Within probably two or four Saturday nights, they weren’t cutting her any slack at all,” Hoover said. “She was really doing good.”

Tozier said she lacked the patience for hunting, but she took to shooting clays with ease.

“When I shot the first target that came out of that trap and I hit it and I was hooked,” she said.

Tozier started shooting competitively at age 14. She started with a local Boy Scouts troop, but felt they were hesitant to put a girl on its top team.

“I got frustrated with that, so I quit shooting with them and we went out on our own,” Tozier said. “My mom and my uncle shot with me. From there, it was just kind of took off.”

Tozier started shooting competitively at age 14, but it’s an expensive sport. She was limited to American trap shooting and couldn’t afford to go farther with the sport — until the Army reached out.

“We didn't have the funds or the resources for me to even try international trap or bunker, so there's absolutely no way that I would be an Olympian now (without the Army),” she said.

Army provides international opportunity

Eight years ago, the Army was looking for women to join its trap-shooting team as part of the Marksmanship Unit and Tozier was one of its first choices.

“I was 24 at that time,” she said. “It took a lot of thinking. But I knew that if I didn't try it, 10 years down the road I would regret it. Now, it's been the greatest decision I've ever made.”

Joining the Army allowed her to become an international trap shooter, which features faster clays spread across a larger field than American trap — an adjustment that took Tozier three years.

“It was very humbling,” she said. “I expected to just start shooting it and pick it up pretty quickly. That was not the case at all. I absolutely hated it the first six months I shot, because I just couldn't break a good score.”

After finding a stock setup that fit in 2019, Tozier qualified for her first international team, winning individual and team silver medals at the 2019 Pan American Games, but she came up short of qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics.

“I was the first alternate for the 2020 Games,” Tozier said. “I wasn't even that disappointed that I didn't make it because I was still so new to it. I was just happy that I got as close as I did.”

Tozier first started to dream of competing in the Olympics as a high school senior, well before she’d ever shot in an international trap competition.

An Olympic mission

By the time she won the individual bronze at the 2023 Pan Am Games, Tozier knew being the first alternate wouldn’t cut it for the Paris Games.

“I knew that it was my turn, that I needed to make this team or I would be devastated,” Tozier said. “... It was a ridiculously high amount of pressure that I put on myself because, not only was I really close the last time, I had made myself, in my head, the shoo-in to make the team. That sounds bad to say it out loud, but, in my head, I was the one that was going to make that team. It was my turn.”

Qualifying for the Olympics in trap shooting is a long process. It started with a competition in May 2023 in Michigan and wrapped up with another competition in March 2024 in Tucson, Arizona.

“We shot 250 targets for the qualification,” Tozier said. “At the end of that 250, three of us were within like two targets of each other and only two of us can make the team, so we shot a 50-target final at the end of the 250-target (qualifier).”

Tozier was the only one of the three to hit the first 25 targets in the final, putting her in command. She hit 10 more in the second half of the final to clinch an Olympic berth.

“The minute I hit that target, I just started crying out on the line,” she said. “We all stopped, everybody on the line stopped. The girl who ended up finishing third — we're pretty good friends — and she came over and gave me a hug. We were both crying.”

Hoover cried, too.

“I think she’s doing great for a small-town farm girl out of Missouri,” he said.

An Olympic journey and new Olympic dream

Her husband, Tom, a retired Army specialist, remembers Tozier’s early frustrations and marvels at her progress.

“I’m very proud,” he said. “She’s come a long way since I first met her.”

In fact, while the Olympics were always a dream, they seemed like a far-fetched one all those Saturday nights ago shooting clay at the family farm.

“I would have laughed in your face and told you there was absolutely no way (back then),” Tozier said. “I would have loved for it to happen, but it's not something I ever thought was possible.”

Now, she dreams of winning a gold medal in Paris.

“It's just a whole lot of visualization and seeing yourself up on that podium in the top spot and having that medal put around your neck and the flowers and the tears and the whole nine yards,” she said. “I think about it almost every day, so I’ve just got to keep hoping and keep training.”

Tozier, who met Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and received a proclamation congratulating her for making the Olympics in early May, is the first person in Missouri history to qualify for the Olympics in women’s trap shooting.

Tozier’s husband and their daughter, Vivienne, will make the trip to Paris along with her mom this summer.

Women’s trap shooting qualification begins July 30. Qualification continues July 31 with the finals later that day.

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