Competition
GUEST EDITORIAL: John Bickar
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thanks for the response, Grant. I have a lot of respect for you for seeking differing viewpoints.
Different people can view the same situation in different ways. (And seven years later, I admit that my recall of the entire weekend may have holes in it as well.)
I helped organize and run the Rapid + Action camp in 2001, and I can assure you that Bob Mitchell said nothing like what you attribute to him. It's no secret that he can rub people in the wrong way (and he and I have had our run-ins). However, my recollection is that he didn't say they weren't good enough so much as he said, "Sorry, guys. We can't fund your run to the Olympics."
Unfortunately, although some of the top shooters such as Todd Jarrett, Bruce Piatt, Don Golembieski, and Bruce Gray did compete in some rapid fire matches after the camp, it boils down to economics. These shooters make a living by the gun, and there's not enough money in Olympic shooting to enable anyone but the most elite (e.g., Matt Emmons) to pay a mortgage and put food on the table.
I saw Bruce Piatt at the Bianchi Cup in 2003 and said, "Hey, when are you going to come back and shoot rapid fire?" He said something along the lines of, "Sorry, I can't do it and stay married." The market for international pistols in the US is too small for manufacturers to make a profit, let alone sponsor shooters.
The truth of the matter is, the path to the Olympics is open to anyone who would like to walk down it. Paradoxically, one of the contributing factors to the limited success that the US has experienced in the Olympic shooting sports is that there are so many other shooting sports to try within the United States. In many countries where private firearms ownership is severely restricted (or banned outright), Olympic shooting is the "only game in town".
My takeaways from the entire experiment were very positive. It led to a high-six-figure sponsorship of USAS (from Kimber), and I forged some strong relationships with a number of action pistol shooters whom I never would have met otherwise.
I hope you'll rethink your decision not to support USA Shooting and the Olympic Shooting Team.
Respectfully,
John Bickar
US Shooting Team
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Have you ever wondered....
Monday, August 25, 2008
...why the United States doesn't dominate Olympic shooting? Note that I didn't say "do better in", I said "dominate." You'd think, given the high penetration of firearms ownership in this country, that we'd make a far better showing than we usually do. With so many shooters, we should have at least a couple of medals in darn near every event!
Yes, we've done pretty well in the shotgun events (of the six medals at this Olympics, four of them came from shotgunners), but outside of clay birds, medals are few and far between. Given the circumstances, that's a pretty sad showing.
What makes the situation even more galling is that a disproportionate number of shooting medals are awarded to competitors who live in intensely anti-gun countries. Some of those countries prohibit the private ownership of firearms altogether, yet their athletes are winning medals. At the risk of being labeled as rabidly jingoistic, those are medals which, logically, should be going to the people who are most familiar with shooting: Americans.
As it happens, the source of the problem may be right under our noses. Let me tell you a little story....
A number of years ago, a bright fellow got the bright idea that perhaps some of our best competitive shooters - people who have competed in venues other than Olympic shooting - might be called upon to join our Olympic team. The concept was simple: pinpoint a specific shooting event, figure out what other shooting discipline might require similar skills, then recruit the best shooters available in that discipline and see if they could adapt to the Olympic event. (Hey, it worked for basketball!)
The event picked for this experiment was the Rapid Fire pistol course, where we've struggled even to make a showing. Olympic Rapid Fire involves shooting 5 tiny targets at 25 meters with a .22 Short pistol, in very short periods of time. It's a demanding event, requiring speed, accuracy, and phenomenal consistency. Now, just who might be able to do that kind of shooting?
It was decided to recruit our best "action" pistol shooters, people who were used to shooting handguns quickly and accurately, and have them practice for the Rapid Fire. People like Doug Koenig, Mickey Fowler, Rob Leatham, Todd Jarret (the whole list reads like a "Who's Who" of pistol shooting) were invited to a training camp with our Olympic team, where they'd see if their skills would transfer over to the Rapid Fire event.
According to someone who was actually there, the week-long camp proved that these professional shooters were quite capable of competing in Rapid Fire. They performed better than anyone had hoped, and they even demonstrated that their skills, forged by decades of practice and tempered by competition at the highest levels, held promise for several other Olympic disciplines. This was shaping up to be something great.
Then the bomb dropped.
(At this point I'll pause to explain that our Olympic shooting teams are the exclusive province of USA Shooting, which is the national governing body for the Olympic shooting sports. You can't get on our shooting team without going through USA Shooting. Period.)
Back to the story...at the end of that week, enthusiasm was high. The participants, both the recruits and their Olympic team hosts, were excited at the prospect of a shooting "dream team". The experiment had been a success, and it seemed as though nothing was standing between them and multiple medals in the Rapid Fire event.
Nothing, that was, except USA Shooting.
As the week was winding down, the Executive Director of USA Shooting stepped up to the podium and declared that the "new shooters" weren't of Olympic caliber. He said that these people - who between them had won a dizzying number of national and international titles - "lacked focus and discipline." No one would be able to get on our Olympic shooting team, the Director continued, unless they came up through the USA Shooting farm system.
According to my source, the speech went downhill from there. No "outsiders" were going to be allowed on "his" team, no matter how good they might be. And these guys were very good.
That, folks, is why we again failed to medal in the Rapid Fire event this year. And every other year. And in many other Olympic shooting events, as well.
The country most steeped in firearms use, the home of the "gun culture", isn't able to field a whole team of shooters that can truly take on the rest of the world. Not because of a lack of talent - because of an entrenched bureaucracy that steadfastly refuses to believe that anyone not in their clique could possibly be any good.
As it happens, last week - flush with Olympic enthusiasm - I had actually decided to write a check to USA Shooting for the support of our team. That is, until I learned what you just learned. I didn't send that check, and I'm not going to.
When USA Shooting drops their nose-in-the-air exclusivity, I'll give them money. Not before. I hope you'll join me by telling them the same thing.
If enough of us do that, maybe they'll get the message that we expect our shooting team to represent the United States, not the local country club. When that happens, perhaps we'll start cleaning up in Olympic shooting.
Just as we should.
-=[ Grant ]=-