Larissa Zuranowa - World Skeet Champion

Today we have another great Jewish shooter from the former Soviet Union, Larissa Gurvich (now Zuranova) I discovered she was Jewish through Google searches for female Jewish shooters, and found a source here and here. I then passed the name along to Ernst over at Backyard-Safari blog, who was able to tell us a little more about her. The following is his post translated with a little help from Google translate:

Larissa Semyonovna Gurwitsch, now Zuranowa, was born on May, 10 1947 in Bessporno. She studied at the Medical Institute in Rostov on Don. In 1963 she began with sporting shotgun under the guidance of her father in Yekaterinburg, now known as Sverdlovsk. She specialized in Skeet and with great success. Gurwitsch was four times world champion (1967, 1970, 1974, 1975), ten-time European champion (first published in 1965) and twelve times the USSR champion. In addition, she set several records. At that time she competed on the Army Sports Club .

Her favorite shotguns were the IZH-12 and IZH-25, which the Izhevsk factory customized for her, because at that time the Soviet-made guns were not popular among competitors. The otherwise delicate-looking woman shot more than 10,000 rounds per year through those guns.

Later she married the equally highly successful shotgunner Zuranow Yuri (1936-2008) and became Larissa Zuranowa. Both worked until the ends of their active careers in the mid-80s as coaches, first in Rostov and later in Yekaterinburg, which is one of the centers of clay target shooting in Russia. She currently lives and works in Novosibirsk . Her protégés include her son Konstantin Zuranow (b. 1972) among others, who participated in the Olympic Games in 2008 in Skeet.

Thanks again to Ernst, as Jewish shooters in the former USSR are very hard to research otherwise. Our newest shotgunning Jewish Marksman, Simms Pearl, has big shoes to fill. The other shotgunning Jewish Marksman we know of is filmmaker Steven Spielberg.