2024 Olympics - The Shooting Sports

[benenglish]

This thread is for coverage and discussion of the shooting sports.

This thread needs to stay on topic. Posts complaining about the Olympics in general will be deleted or moved.

 

[benenglish]

 

[benenglish]

 

[benenglish]

Mixed Team Air Rifle

This is a newer Olympic sport, designed to help the governing body reach parity between men and women as to number of medals earned. Whether we think that's a useful goal or not (I don't think so, but maybe that's just me.) it's interesting to watch.

China got the Gold. The female on the team, btw, is 17 years old. She's going to be racking up medals for a long, long time.

 

[Byrd666]

China won Air Rifle Gold this AM, CDT. Don't remember Silver or Bronze

 

[benenglish]

China won Air Rifle Gold this AM, CDT. Don't remember Silver or Bronze

China is a huge fan of the shooting sports. They won their first Olympic medal, a gold, in Free Pistol (Men's 50M Pistol) and the entire nation has celebrated their shooting team ever since. Olympic medalist shooters in China are treated like rock stars.

 

[benenglish]

Tips on watching the Olympic shooting events -

• The most streamlined way to watch the qualifying and final rounds for almost all shooting sports is to go to NBCOlympics.com and use your cable provider login to access the streaming content. Most cable provider credentials can be used. This page will get you to the beginning of streaming. Use the drop down menu at the top of the page. It is set to "All Sports" by default but is easily changed to "Shooting."
• Abbreviated summaries showing the end of the finals for almost every event will be posted on YouTube by the NBC Sports channel. They can't be embedded here but I'll try anyway; you'll see a black box in this thread. Click on it and it will take you to YT to see the video. After The Games end, if they follow past practice, the embedded videos should become available here, too.
• For help viewing the Olympics online, this help page is pretty much the best source of info.
• The best comprehensive coverage of the Olympics is via a subscription to a premium Peacock account. If you use Peacock regularly, you know you can use it to see all the Olympics in one place.
• The best written coverage of Olympic shooting comes from the governing body, the ISSF. The articles there will contain all the nitty gritty. Unfortunately, I've already found at least one glaring error in their coverage but, overall, if you want to really geek out on this stuff, the place to be is their blog which will be featured on the ISSF home page while the Olympics are happening.
• The shooting events will be posted to the ISSF YouTube channel after the Olympics is over. During The Games they will have new video but not of the actual events. There will be behind-the-scenes stuff, mostly, but it's hard to tell because their video streaming is pretty disorganized and always has been. For example, as I write this there's a replay of a livestream on their channel you'll only find it if you know to click the "Live" link on the channel page. It's generally boring but if you're interested, I'll put it in the next post.

During the games, NBC has a (technical) monopoly on all means of disseminating video in this market. Anyone with a VPN who wants to clue us in on using other countries to get better or more timely reporting is encouraged to post in this thread.

 

[benenglish]

ISSF House Livestream

The content here will be hit-or-miss and I reckon most folks won't care about any of this. Still, if you can't get enough of guys in suits trying to act like they care about the shooting sports and giving boring speeches while they're really just there for the free food and random gorgeous women in gowns with plunging necklines, I suppose this is as good a place to watch as any. Is this really the way "rich sportsmen" party?

 

[benenglish]

Folks tend to wonder about the firearms used in these events. I posted this four years ago and, with some editing, I'm repeating it here. I find super-functional firearms like this fascinating.

There are several (5, I think) trap and skeet events. I assume everyone knows what a nice competition shotgun looks like. Now cover it with stickers from previous competitions and you'll have an idea what the shotguns at the Olympics look like.

In the Modern Pentathlon, the shooters do a sort of summer version of biathlon with laser pistols. IOW, they run 800 meters, stop and shoot five shots, and repeat several times. The pistols usually look something like this:

In the 50m Rifle 3 Positions where there are separate contests for men and women, the rifles put the lie to the notion that only ARs are Barbies for men because of all the accessories they can take. The rifles used in these events can be customized to a mind-boggling degree. You want a bolt knob that's a particular color? It's available off the shelf. Everything is infinitely adjustable and replaceable in various colors and materials. Some are wildly painted and some are pure, gleaming, polished aluminum.

So keep in mind that there are endless variations but the .22 LR rifles tend to start out looking something about like this:

There are 10m Air Rifle events for men, women, and mixed teams. Their rifles tend to look a lot like the 3 Position cartridge rifles until you realize there's a big compressed air cylinder under the barrel. For example -

There's a 25m Rapid Fire Pistol event for men only. I think the Pardini is still the dominant player there. This is a new one. The ones at the Olympics will likely be covered with stickers from previous events.

There's a 25m Pistol event for women, only. It's sort of a timed fire thing, with the pistol lowered 45 degrees before every shot of the competition. They look about like the rapid fire pistols the men use. For example:

The 10m Air Pistol is shot separately for both men and women. The air pistols look like, well, air pistols. See what I mean about the stickers?

There are also men and women's mixed teams for air rifle and air pistol. The equipment is the same as for the individual events.

 

[Lead Belly]

10M discipline. Are they off-axis? Could they use a Send-It or some other level to tighten their shots with such a high offset? I know nothing of this sport,... other than shooting .177 pellets at soda cans.

 

[cckirk]

Very cool, Greek to me, but really interesting stuff.

 

[benenglish]

10M discipline. Are they off-axis?

Oh, yeah. They find a position that's comfortable and stable and then adjust the rifle to fit them, not the other way around.

The bases of the iron sights, front and rear, are often radiused so that the sights can be mounted with the line of sight directly over the bore even when the rifle is severely canted.

ETA: Here's something I posted during the previous Olympic Games -

Look at the way the Russian shooter has her rifle severely canted. Lots of the top level shooters do that, some to a much greater degree than this. But like I said in the post where I did an overview of the equipment, the rifles these folks use are customizable in every way. There are curved-top sight mounts that allow the front and rear sights to be nowhere near directly above the bore...if that's the way the shooter can hold the rifle the steadiest. She appears to be using a custom front sight mounting block to perform this function. It may look all cattywampus but that's one of the ways you can win shooting medals at the Olympics.

BTW, these are the gold and silver medalists. The Russian was ahead by 0.2 until the last shot of the finals when she completely blew it, shooting an 8.9. The Chinese shooter also had a less-good-than-expected final shot with a 9.8 but that was enough to blow away the 0.2 lead the Russian had a few seconds previously.

Yeah, they're just silly, over-complicated air rifles in a competition that many would dismiss as an exercise in uselessness.

But if you're into it, those last two shots were absolutely thrilling.

ETA 2 - Looking closely at the picture (blow it up really big), the Russian has her sights offset greatly to the left from her perspective. But the front and rear are offset from the bore the same amount, allowing her to keep her head level. That's more stable for most folks. Since the targets are always at exactly the same distance, the offset doesn't have any impact on zero.

Fascinating stuff. To me, at least.

 

[benenglish]

Men's Air Pistol

The Chinese medal factory scores another gold medal with Xie Yu winning the Men's Air Pistol event. Italy got both the Silver and Bronze.

 

[benenglish]

Women's Air Pistol

South Korea gets the gold and silver; India gets the bronze.

The body language and look on the Indian shooters face when, on the last shot, she drops one place to be relegated to bronze by a margin of just 0.1 points is amazing, showing the kind of drive it takes to compete at this level. You can tell she's absolutely whipping herself inside for failing to hold her lead. Yet to us plebes, just being good enough to be on that range is far above anything we could imagine. Olympians are a different breed.

 

[Rafe]

In related news, South Korea won--and this pretty staggering--its 10th consecutive gold medal in women's team archery. The last time they didn't win gold at the Olympics was 1980.

 

[benenglish]

Men's Air Rifle

Gold to China. Silver to Sweden. Bronze to Croatia.

 

[benenglish]

Women's Air Rifle

South Korea wins Gold. China takes Silver. Switzerland for the Bronze.

The top two show as tied in the results. At the last shot of the finals, they were 0.9 points apart but the South Korean shooter managed to blow that lead, resulting in identical final scores. Those stand as official. Podium placement was then decided by a shoot-off. I can't imagine what it's like to spend all those years training and have the final determination of gold or silver decided by a single shot but the South Korean shooter managed to come back from that previously blown shot to win gold by 0.1 points.

 

[benenglish]

Mixed Team Air Pistol

Serbia wins their first Olympic shooting gold medal. Turkey earns Silver. India takes bronze.

 

[benenglish]

Men's Trap

Great Britain took the gold, specifically a shooter named Nathan Hale. I can't get over the cognitive dissonance of a Brit with that name. It was also the first gold in this sport for GB.

China got silver.

Congrats to Guatemala for winning only the second Olympic medal ever won by that country, the bronze. He was tied with the shooter from Sweden and was awarded the medal based on bib number. Bib numbers are assigned numerically based on the score attained in qualifying. I have no problem with that; it's based on something important. But I can see why some folks feel like awarding a medal based on what number a competitor wears on their back is yucky.

 

[benenglish]

Women's Trap

Guatemala earned the gold, the first gold medal, ever, for that country. Silver went to Italy. Australia took Bronze.