Marion was born in 1946, the son of Noël Marion and Adèle Létang, and began shooting at the age of twelve. An early mentor was
Gerry Ouellette, a gold medallist in the
1956 Olympic Games: Marion later recounted that Ouellette's first response to his request for advice was to hand him a box of 5,000
cartridges, telling him to return when he had fired them all. Ouellette gave Marion a rifle and drove him to his early shooting matches. Marion was first selected to represent Canada at the age of twenty. Marion was part of the winning Canadian teams in the 1972 and 1982 World Long Range Championships. He was capped three times for Canada in the
Commonwealth Games. Along with William "Wilf" Baldwin, he won the gold medal in the fullbore pairs event at the
1986 Games, held in Edinburgh, with a score of 583 out of 600. For
the 1998 games, in
Kuala Lumpur, technical difficulties forced him to use his second choice of rifle: he and
Jim Paton placed second with a score of 298 out of 300. In the same games, Marion placed second in the individual
Queen's Prize with a score of 396 out of 400. In 2002, he was a coach for the Canadian shooting team at the
Melbourne Commonwealth Games. He won the
Dominion of Canada Rifle Association's fullbore championships twelve times, a record . He won the Canadian Grand Aggregate ten times, also a record, and the Governor General's Prize five times. Marion was capped forty-two times in the Canadian team for the
Imperial Meeting at
Bisley in the United Kingdom, more than any other shooter. At Bisley, he won the Queen's Prize in 1980, 1983 and 1996, placing second in 1972 and third in both 1987 and 1990. His score of 294 out of 300 in 1980 was, at the time, a record; Marion had previously set a record of 293 jointly with the British shooter Dick Rosling in 1972, but lost to Rosling in a tie shoot. Marion won the Grand Aggregate in 1990, having previously placed second in 1973 and 1980. He placed in the top hundred of the Queen's Prize and the top fifty of the Grand Aggregate sixteen times apiece, both a record for a non-British competitor . After
Arthur Fulton, who won in 1912, 1926 and 1931, he was the second shooter to win the Sovereign's Prize three times: , no shooter has surpassed this total. He won over twenty Canadian provincial championships. He also won a bronze medal in the Commonwealth Shooting Federation Championship. The British
National Rifle Association described Marion as "one of the greats in the world of ". On October 25, 1991, he was awarded membership of the
Order of Canada. He worked as a police officer in
Hull, Quebec, and was married to Francine Vadnais; he had one daughter. When interviewed in 1998 about the reasons for his shooting success, he said "I just kept doing it and it worked". ==References==