Olympic tips：How to enjoy shooting competitions

15:29, August 03, 2012

Shooters paticipate in the Women's 10m Air Rifle Finals competition of the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Royal Artillery Barracks in London, Britain, on July 28, 2012. Yu Siling of China won gold medal with a total score of 502.9. (Xinhua/Yang Lei)

Due to the schedule of the Olympics, the Chinese shooting team, including Xu Haifeng, Tao Luna and Yi Siling, always shoulders the mission of winning the first gold medal for China in an Olympics. Fortunately, the excellent Chinese shooters' capacities of resisting pressures are outstanding. By July 31, the Chinese shooting team had won two gold medals, one silver medal and one bronze medal in the London Olympics, ranking first in all the shooting teams. However, in the long Olympic shooting event with 15 gold medals, the Chinese shooting team's journey has just started.

How to remember various classifications of the shooting event

Of all Olympic events, some have gradually "shrunk" and some have gradually "expanded" to current sizes. The shooting belongs to the latter. Currently the Olympic shooting event has 15 sub-events, but in the Olympics of 1932, the shooting event had only two sub-events of men's 50-meter prone position rifle shooting and men's 25-meter rapid-fire pistol shooting. After the Second World War, the Olympic shooting event started to grow steadily. Now, the Olympic shooting event covers three classifications of the rifle shooting (such as women's 10-meter air rifle shooting and men's 50-meter prone position rifle shooting), pistol shooting (such as men's 10-meter air pistol shooting and women's sports pistol shooting) and clay pigeon shooting (such as men's skeet shooting). It is not easy to remember all these complex sub-events, but if we make combinations of "10-meter," "25-meter" and "50 meter" with "rifle" and "pistol," we can remember them in general. Although the classifications are complex, outstanding shooters always impress us very much. In 1938, a Hungarian shooter Karoly Takacs had his right hand injured by a grenade, then he started to practice shooting with his left hand, and he won two gold medals of shooting in the Olympics of 1948 and Olympics of 1952.

How to distinguish the three clay pigeon shooting events

In the London Olympics, the targets of rifle and pistol shootings are electronic targets, but the targets of the clay pigeon shooting are made of asphalt, plaster and other materials. Today, it is a natural thing. But in the first Olympics held 100 years ago, things were completely different. At that time, the targets of the clay pigeon shooting were real pigeons. It was a fair method, because, after all, no one could tell where the pigeon would fly. But it was too cruel and the "targets" could not be repeatedly used. Fortunately, since the Olympics of 1908, clay pigeons started to be used instead. In the London Olympics, a total of 270,000 clay pigeons would be used.

If we want to understand and enjoy the clay pigeon shooting, it is necessary we are able to distinguish the three clay pigeon shooting events first, which are the skeet shooting, trap shooting and double trap shooting. In short, in the trap shooting, the target thrower throws a single target at different angles and elevations. In the double trap shooting, the target thrower throws two targets at different angles and elevations. In the double trap shooting, there are two kinds of shooting. Two target throwers throw two targets together and one of the two throwers throws one target at different angles and elevations. Since the Olympics of 1968, women shooters started to be allowed to participate in the shooting competitions. For a long period from then on, some shooting events allowed both men and women to participate. Therefore, in the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, a Chinese female shooter Zhang Shan won the gold medal of the skeet shooting, becoming the first female gold medal winner of a shooting event with both male and female competitors in the Olympic history.

Read the Chinese version: 如何看懂射击比赛

Source:People's Daily, author: Liu Shuoyang

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（Editor：叶欣、雪萌）

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