Article 11 – 2024 (December)
Australian Shooter Magazine
Question and Answers
Article 11 – 2024 (December)
Question: In the past I have always followed your analysis of how our Olympic Shooting Team performed. What is your opinion of the team’s performance in Paris? I feel the Shotgun team would be happy, but Pistol and Rifle would be disappointed.
Dean Thomas, Miners Rest VIC
Answer: By and large I agree with your assessment. The Shotgun shooters have another medallist in their midst, they have twelve individual athletes that have made an Olympic final and seven competitors that have won their nine medals since 1996, with Penny Smith capturing a bronze medal in the Women’s Trap competition. James Willett making his second Olympic final is a great achievement, but being knocked out first would have gutted him, especially on the back of his number one world ranking. Mitch Iles, who was eliminated in a sudden death shoot-off to make the six-man Trap final, should feel satisfied with his performance, although knowing him well I bet he isn’t, but he proved that the “quota place swap” that took place by Shooting Australia from Men’s Air Pistol to Men’s Trap was well justified.
Pistol and Rifle in Australia continue to tread water. The last Pistol athlete to make an Olympic final was back in 2000 and in the same period of time only one Rifle competitor has managed to reach the pointy end of the competition. With a home Olympics only eight years away that is a very daunting statistic. I feel young Jack Rossiter in Men’s Air Rifle, although finishing in sixteenth place in Paris, has shown some promise over the past twelve months and will be someone to keep an eye on.
In summary, the Shooting team’s effort would achieve a pass mark, but only just. Their goal was to win one to two medals, and that’s what happened. Their potential is way higher than just one medal. Whatever Rifle and Pistol are doing they need a drastic change of direction and strategy as the Shotgun team, who really aren’t doing anything at all technically ground breaking, won’t always be able to carry the other two disciplines.
Do we just give up on the non-performing events and their athletes? No, that isn’t the answer, but what we need to do something different. Sadly, the answers often are found in funding and the bottom line in the wash up from Paris will be that the Shooting sports will not have done enough to convince the Australian Sports Commission to throw us that much needed extra revenue. They make struggle to keep the funding they had in real “inflation adjusted” dollar terms so, in essence, we need to spend our money more wisely.
Extra funding certainly doesn’t guarantee extra medals. If the money isn’t spent in the right areas, then it become irrelevant how much cash is thrown around, but the grim reality is that Australia is working on a vastly smaller budget than many of the shooting countries trying to make an impact internationally in the Shooting sports. In the past three years I worked with both the Indian and Qatar Shooting teams and I can assure you that they are playing with at least ten times the funding than the Australian team are receiving. Once again, I am not suggesting you can buy Olympic medals, but it sure doesn’t hurt. The obvious place Australia needs to start spending money on is in the specialist coaching department. In particular in Shotgun where Australia is probably the only decent country on earth that tries to employ an administrator as a team manager and then gives the same person a dual title as the Trap and Skeet coach. That doesn’t cut it these days I am afraid as the sport is just getting way too professional for that nonsense.
I believe it is a solid six year minimum process to build an athlete to be an Olympic medallist from the time they can prove they can compete consistently and competently in domestic competitions. With the growing prospect that the Shooting sports will now definitely be included in the 2032 program, after favourable feedback after Paris from the International Olympic Committee, we still have time to find our next crop of champions. Who knows? They might be shooting right beside at the range next weekend for the first time. Keep an eye out.
FAREWELL
After twenty-five years this will be my last column. I have now officially retired from the Shooting sports both as a competitor and an administrator at all levels. Last year I franchised our corporate and entertainment shooting interests in “Go Shooting Pty Ltd” both in Victoria and Queensland and I will now significantly scale back my domestic and international coaching duties to selected cliental only.
I will continue to oversee my two hotels at Hoppers Crossing in Melbourne, but earlier in the year my wife, Lauryn, and I bought a property on the beach in the very heart of Surfers Paradise and with my three children now all very independent, we plan on spending our spare time between Melbourne, the Gold Coast and on the banks of the Darling River on a property I own just north of Pooncarie in New South Wales.
I would like to thank the staff of the Australian Shooter magazine and the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia for all their support over the past three decades, but most of all I would like to acknowledge the thousands of emails I have received over that time. I have always tried to answer everyone’s questions and it has constantly been a very difficult task to select whose concerns actually get published.
Finally, I would like to wish everyone all the best for the holiday season and straight shooting in the new year and beyond.