Shooting Sports in the Olympic Games

The first Tokyo 2021 Olympics medal will be won in shooting as 10 meter air rifle in women discipline is the first one to take place on 24 July 2021.

Shooting has been an Olympic sport since the first modern Olympics in 1896 with the exception of two years - St Louis 1904 and Amsterdam1928. Till 1984 Los Angeles Olympics shooting had only men disciplines, women’s events were added in 1984. Let’s take a look at shooting sports’ history in the Olympic Games.

The Beginning

Shooting is as much a part of the Olympics as any track and field event. In fact, at those first Olympic Games, there were 43 total events including shooting.

The very first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece in 1896 and was attended by 280 male athletes from thirteen countries. That year, only seven countries – Denmark, Greece, France, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland and the United States with 61 athletes in total participated in the shooting events. In 1896 there were five shooting events at the Olympics and in 1932 it was down to just two events. The first shooting disciplines in 1896 were:

  1. Army rifle 300-meter
  2. Army rifle 200-meter
  3. 25-metre military pistol
  4. 50-metre rapid-fire pistol
  5. 30-meter free pistol

The Olympic pedestal was dominated by only three countries- Greece, Denmark, and the United States.

The shooting competition was held in a specially built shooting range at Kallithea. One of the contestants and first Olympic gold medallists John Paine from the United States described the area as “the prettiest shooting house in the world - 200 feet long and built entirely of snow-white marble.” The targets they used were black bull’s eyes with white circles painted in the centre. John said that because of the intense white of the building and the bright light, the targets played an optical illusion and appeared to rotate.

The opening of the shooting events was inaugurated on April 8, 1896, by the Queen of Greece pulling a trigger. She fired one shot from a rifle opening the shooting competition of the modern Olympic Games. The first shooting events in the Olympics had a complex scoring system. The competition in rifle shooting consisted of four strings of ten shots and five strings of six shots in the pistol. The total score of each string was then calculated by multiplying the number of hits for the string times the score for the shots done in that string.

Modern Day Olympic Shooting

Shooting now has the third-highest number of participants of any event in the Olympics. From 1996 - 2012, the shooting sports drew participants from over 100 countries each year. It has gone from a low of two events in 1932 to a high of 15 different shooting events in 2000 and 2004. Shooting sports in the Olympics have been labelled as “Men’s” competitions, but from 1968 until 1980 were nominally open to women as well, although few competed. For example, during the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, only five women competed in shooting events. The next summer games were held in Los Angeles in 1984, and the “Women’s” competition was adopted for shooting sports. That year, 77 female shooters competed. 2021 will be the first year there will be Men’s, Women’s, and Mixed categories.

In modern-day Olympics there are three types of guns used:

The rifle: single-loaded in 5.6-millimetre calibre used across all events. The pistol: 4.5-millimetre calibre single loaded pistol is used in 10m air pistol but for 25m events a 5.6 calibre rapid fire pistol with a five-shot magazine is used. The shotgun: a 12-gauge having a calibre of 18.5-millimetres

Currently, there are 15 different shooting events:

MEN:

  • 10 m air pistol
  • 10 m air rifle
  • 25 m rapid fire pistol
  • 50 m rifle 3 position
  • Shotgun skeet
  • Shotgun trap

WOMEN:

  • 10 m air pistol
  • 10 m air rifle
  • 25 m pistol
  • 50 m rifle 3 position
  • Shotgun skeet
  • Shotgun trap

MIXED TEAM:

  • 10 m air rifle
  • 10 m air pistol
  • Shotgun trap

Legend of Olympics

One of the greatest Olympic marksmen in history is Kimberly Rhode from the United States. The modern-day Olympics’ shooting events wouldn’t be the same without her. Between 1996 and 2016, she earned medals in six straight Olympic games. She is the first-ever athlete, male or female, to accomplish that feat in the Summer Olympics, and only matched by Italian luger Armin Zöggeler in the Winter Olympics.

Rhode is the only Olympic shooter to ever win three gold medals and is the only female Olympian to ever win two gold medals in Double Trap. In 1996, Rhode became the youngest-ever gold medallist in shooting sports when she won in Atlanta at the age of seventeen. During the 2012 games, she tied a world record by hitting 99 out of 100 clays in skeet shooting.

Rhode, now 41, has been quoted as saying that shooting is a sport where you can have a very long career. It’s true, as the oldest Olympic medallist in history was a marksman named Oscar Swahn who won silver in 1920 at the age of seventy-two. Rhode has already said that she plans on competing again in hopes of medalling in her seventh straight Olympic Games.