Why no benchrest in the Olympics??

S

skeetlee

Active member
Wouldn't it be really great if our sport of point blank benchrest were observed in the Olympic sports. I understand some of the difficulties there would be, but i bet its doable. There are several other shooting sports already observed in the games,why not ours!! Just a thought. Lee
 
This was discussed in length a couple of years ago at Kelblys by me (for Canada) and the President of WBRF and a couple of other country members, we have enough countries but NOT ENOUGH INTEREST IN TV VIEWERS, and there are shooting events in the "O" already so we are S out of Luck.

Jefferson
 
To few shooting rfBR world wide to make it viable. If they can drop womens double trap clay shooting. RFBR doesn't stand an earthly chance of getting selected.

First step would be to get it on the ISSF calender. Good luck with that one.:rolleyes:
 
Watching paint dry or cement dry is about the same

Agreed, but so is that small bore 22lr shooting stuff. Hell trap and skeet isnt much of a sport to watch either, truth be told!! Lee
 
Seems to me that every shooting sport that works, to greater or lesser degrees as a spectator sport has immediate results, the pinnacle of these being the ISSF with their electronic targets, finals shootoffs & extra degree of discrimination for the "paper" target events.

Maybe with electronic targets you could make the rimfire & benchrest score shooting matches work, but shooting for group hasn't much chance of cutting the mustard. You'd still have the issue of the average joe thinking that shooting off rests is just too easy compared with the accepted events.
 
The sports that are shot in the Olympics are changing. Finals have been implemented to make them less boring. Clearly, the ISSF is already under pressure to come up with TV-friendly drama to end their matches. Rapid fire pistol now has a "start all over" format in the finals where the qualifications are thrown out and the top six qualifiers shoot just 8 strings of 4 seconds each to determine the winner. When Rio rolls around, Men's 50M prone rifle will implement something similar.

The shooters hate it since it throws away all their work in the qualifications and makes the winner far less predictable. The RF winner from Cuba was something like a 50-to-1 shot in the betting odds in London. How much fun would it be to shoot a world record aggregate over 2 days to get into the final, then have that score thrown out and your final place be determined by a single group? That's essentially what happened to Klimov at his finals where he finished out of the medals even though he had set a record in qualifications and, under the old system, would have been declared the outright winner.

So if you want benchrest in the Olympics, you need at least three things:

  1. ISSF sanction. No other organization will do. You also have to be willing to accept the incredible bureaucracy, expense, and politics that goes along with anything done under ISSF auspices. (Examples of expense and bureaucracy/rules-run-amok? The lady rifle shooters have to dress in front of judges to make sure they aren't taping their bodies. The pistol shooters must allow their shoes to be chucked into a very expensive device that measures the flexibility of the sole. And everybody must pee in a cup or allow a blood draw at any time, without notice, all during the years of training running up to the Olympics. How many benchrest shooters would be comfortable with procedures like that?)
  2. A match with an exciting shoot-off format that's fun to watch on TV. The current sports are headed there and no new sport has a snowball's chance without such.
  3. Use the .22 LR exclusively. Firing bays already cost multiple millions of dollars to build. No one is going to extend them past 50 meters. (Heck, the dozen or so 25M rapid fire bays at the Atlanta Olympics cost USD$250,000 each to install and they only handle two shooters at a time.) Also, .22 rimfires are acceptable in more countries that have legal problems with civilians and centerfire rifles.
Is it possible to achieve those three things? If you get that far, then the sport must grow to include a solid group of competitors in virtually every nation, along with a professional National Governing Body. Then folks could start realistically campaigning to get into the Olympics.

I don't see it happening.
 
benenglish said:
If you get that far, then the sport must grow to include a solid group of competitors in virtually every nation, along with a professional National Governing Body. Then folks could start realistically campaigning to get into the Olympics.

I don't see it happening.
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Ben

ISSF sanction and "solid group of competitors in virtually every nation".......................

The only things that count.
 
Hambone said:
ISSF sanction and "solid group of competitors in virtually every nation".......................

The only things that count.
Click to expand...
I accept that those are the core needs. Still, I feel that even if those were achieved there are political, procedural, and other considerations that would kill an attempt to get any additional shooting sport added to the Olympics. Heck, I'd love to see Free Rifle come back but it just ain't gonna happen.
 
I agree on all points. I think the antigun lobbiest would scupper any move towards adding any firearm relates sport.
 
Why no BR in Olympics.....Well they're adding GOLF in 2016 NOW that's BORING. It's like watching the DEAD SEA EVAPORATE, and ya know they can have ONLY 1 TRUELY boreing spectator sport and GOLF won hands down. .... No offence to you PUTTER JOCKIES out there, it's just not much of a spectator sport IMHO (participating YES watching NO).
 
World wide golf as a participation sport must out strip RFBR by a factor of 50 or more. Its already extremely well established as a international sport and the money runs into the billions.

Hell they ever have a big money seniors tour. So FredJ should be ok.
 
That drug test Benenglish mentioned would be difficult to get past for us old benchresters - just on the prescription stuff alone. Hell, I gotta do a hydrocodone or two to put my flags together, much less go set them out.

We can be happy keeping this benchrest stuff to ourselves. If we don't, first cracker out of the barrel they would be wanting to do away with sporter class.:eek:
 
I think IPSC or IDPA or similar events have a better chance than benchrest, at least from an audience excitement point of view. Plus, just listening to the anti-gun folks rip their hair out because they are shooting at targets that look like people would be worth the price of admission.

I really don't think Benchrest has a chance. Are there spectator stands at matches? Tickets being sold in advance? Box seats?

Until there are, it isn't going on TV. Olympics are not so much national pride as big business these days.

BTW: Boring or not, there are spectotors at golf matches, they are watched on TV, they sell sponsor time at high prices. BR, not so much.

Fitch
 
frwillia said:
I think IPSC or IDPA or similar events have a better chance than benchrest, at least from an audience excitement point of view. Plus, just listening to the anti-gun folks rip their hair out because they are shooting at targets that look like people would be worth the price of admission.
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IPSC and IDPA can NOT get an event into the Olympics. Shooting events MUST be sanctioned by the ISSF and no one else.

The last new-on-the-scene shooting event that had a chance to be added to the Olympics was handgun silhouette, way back in the late 70s and early 80s. It grew to over 10,000 participants in the U.S. over the space of just a few years. There was significant interest around the world and there was even the beginnings of spectator support, as crazy as that seems.

But IHMSA (which, at that time, was essentially just a business belonging to one man) refused to give up control of their rules and procedures to the ISU (now ISSF). Despite the fact that a worldwide body did form (the IMSSU) that could have worked under the ISSF umbrella, the loss of the U.S. contingent meant that the sport lost all momentum on the world stage. Not coincidentally, the sport also lost momentum in the U.S. due to a number of factors, specifically including the death of the man who ruled it.

Since WW2, shooting sports have come out of the Olympics. None have been added. There's been some gender-specific shuffling of events (Boy, was that a mess back in the 1960s and 1970s!) but nothing has been added. Free rifle is gone. Running target is gone.

There are really only two reasons that shooting stays in the Olympics. First, the founder of the modern Olympics was a pistol shooter so there's a strong tradition. (Did you know that the first medal at the Olympics, by tradition, is awarded to a pistol shooter?) Second, shooting is something that any country can be competitive in and, thus, it has a broad base of support. In how many sports, for example, do Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Qatar, Belarus, Slovenia, Slovakia and Cuba have a chance of winning a medal like they did in London? The IOC likes to spread medals around to plucky underdog nations; it's good PR. Shooting fills the bill on that.

Unfortunately, as the Olympics turns exclusively into a massive marketing machine, sports without big sponsors will suffer. The ISSF is changing match formats to make them more TV-friendly and, thus far, they haven't really succeeded. The notion of benchrest going into the Olympics is kinda off the radar of Olympic shooters and administrators; they're more worried about keeping any shooting in the Olympics.
 
Jefferson said:
This was discussed in length a couple of years ago at Kelblys by me (for Canada) and the President of WBRF and a couple of other country members, we have enough countries but NOT ENOUGH INTEREST IN TV VIEWERS, and there are shooting events in the "O" already so we are S out of Luck.

Jefferson
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I have never seen a single shooting event on TV from the olympics. Are they on TV now? If not, whats the big deal?
 
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