Outside The Box: How to make shooting an interesting Olympic sport

Watching my teammates rumble through the streets and buildings of fictional city Verdansk is quite literally the most gripping thing in the history of the world — and that contrasts greatly with watching shooting at the Olympics.

I'd call current shooting events “boring”, but that would be disrespectful to boredom — something just needs to be done to get the most out of a sport with all the potential in the world.

Sometimes to go forwards, looking back is the best place to start; the 1920 Summer Olympics’ shooting program sounded like a genuine electric factory, with a smorgasbord of events including the 600 m military rifle, 100 m running deer and team clay pigeons.

OTB couldn't track down the television ratings for the 1920 Olympics, but rest assured they probably would have been through the roof; anybody that says they wouldn’t watch people try and snipe down targets from nearly a kilometre is lying.

In maybe the nichest column in the history of the written word, yep, today we've got a five-point plan to save shooting.

Get rid of the current events

To be honest, current Olympic shooting events are cowardly.

The 10 m air pistol and air rifle events prove little other than who can grab out an x16 handgun and put a bullet in someone from absolute point-blank range.

The 25 m rapid fire pistol is getting somewhere and I like the variety of the 50 m rifle three position, but what do they really mean?

Lets ramp it up a bit and standing on the middle step of the podium will mean so much more.

Sniping

I'm sorry, but if you think watching someone fire a little handgun is more interesting than watching a bloke post up hundreds of metres away from a target with a Kar98k sniper and just pick it off, honestly get out.

Sniping is a real thorough test of what it is to be a marksman; you need patience, precision, nerve, killer instinct, even more patience (the COD campers get me) and just genuine accuracy.

As previously mentioned, the OG shooters in the 1920s were testing their skills from distance; Sweden, of all countries, showed itself to have the best gunners with Hugo Johansson and Mauritz Eriksson going one-two after a dramatic shoot-off.

There's many ways this could be approached; the simple, traditional shooting approach of just lying in a field and firing at a target would be impressive, but the conditions would be what makes this good.

I picture the athletes camping up on a hill (high-ground obviously vital for hitting snipes) as random dummy bodies and animals roam a field — perhaps there's five targets roaming the area say 600 m away, and each shooter has one or two minutes to pick off as many as possible with as few bullets as possible.

There's at least two events here; one that tests pure, repeated accuracy, and another that examines simply who can hit the longest snipe.

One of my mates once drilled a one-shot kill from 218 m (admittedly in COD, but still a great achievement) — but after reading that Sweden's Hugo Johansson went 59 for 60 from 600 m back in 1920, and the world record longest confirmed snipe kill is 3540 m, I'm thinking 218 m just might not get it done.

Maybe we go for a pole vault/high jump approach — name your target distance, three attempts, if you get one of them you're still in.

Thinking stationary targets for this — the distance will be impressive enough.

Better weapons

Would you be more likely to watch an event called the 10 m air pistol, or one called the 50 m submachine gun?

Ask yourself truthfully, would you be more likely to watch shooting if the competitors were using something called a ‘sport rifle’, or if they were using a rocket launcher, just annihilating vehicles with an RPG-7?

This one barely needs explanation; more powerful, dangerous weaponry is just guaranteed to produce fireworks.

Gulag battles

We haven't really developed the specific technology for this, but a 64-man one v one tournament could honestly be the most electric event in the history of history.

The concept; two players enter a small room filled with obstacles, armed with identical guns and explosives, and they battle until one prevails.

Do you rush them? Do you camp? Do you throw your explosives in a Kobe-like fashion?

These battles will typically go for 15-odd seconds, and it doesn't just test your ability with strap in-hand, but your all-round ability as a solider.

The obvious flaw here is we can't actually let people die in these events, so if we can develop some sort of technology to simulate this while remaining as realistic as possible, please let me know via email at alex.mitchell@sheppnews.com.au

Use bodies instead of targets

Look, I'm a vegetarian and a meek man by nature — so actually killing animals or humans for Olympic sport just wouldn't sit right with me.

But anyone can stare at a bullseye and fire an Origin 12 shotgun through its middle — shooting should test who can stare a beast in the eye and mercilessly gun it down.

So for some of these events, do we redevelop the targets and essentially make them a dummy human torso — maximum points obviously for a headshot, a good score too for hitting vital organs such as a heart or a lung, while shots to arms will be treated as what they really are, flesh wounds.

Simulating blood spatter would certainly be edging toward inappropriateness, and although it would add a genuine sense of reality to proceedings, I'm not advocating for it — but I'm also not advocating for it, if you get me.not

And particularly for the sniping events, I really do think moving targets need to be developed.

Not necessarily in a straight line either because that would be too predictable; does the target move up and down in a crouching motion, move either left or right at any time, like the possibilities are literally endless.

These are just all things we should sleep on and see what we can come up with — but there is potential for Olympic shooting to be the most anticipated and most watched events on the sporting calendar.