2008 Olympics Updates

Olympic Green Archery Field

A bit like the sailors at currently windless Qingdao, Britain’s medal tally has hit the doldrums over the last couple of days.

There was concern this first week was going to be slow, and to be honest, so it has proved.

Apart from the swimmers, who’ve had a great Olympics, and the cycling team who will undoubtedly be Britain’s biggest providers, there’s been disappointment elsewhere.

Nothing out of judo, diving, badminton, tennis, shooting - and now archery, where I’ve been spending my time over the last few days.

Archery had a target of two medals, and managed only a 4th place in the women’s team event.

Let’s add some context to that.

Last year was a particularly good one for the British archers, winning three medals at the World Championships, but it’s here in Beijing where it really counts, where the fruits of their labours, and the £2.8m investment the sport’s had in the past four years should be reaped.

What’s gone wrong?

Alan Wills offered me an insight straight after bowing out in the last 16 this morning.

He told me the head coach, Peter Suk, wasn’t letting him “be himself” out on the target field.

He wanted to feel more aggression, but felt that his personality was being subdued, because Suk wanted a calmer approach.

Team-mate Simon Terry mentioned “issues around the team” the other day, and clearly that’s what he was alluding to.

I’m left to question why wasn’t this resolved before the games?

If Wills wasn’t getting what he personally needed, then why?

After all he’s the bloke out there drawing the bow.

Whether this is a management or a communication issue, I don’t know, but the net result is a flat team, flat performances and a zero in the medals column.

Team leader, Hilda Gibson, said that there’d be a chance to get all this out into the open at a big de-brief post games.

Fine, but forgive me, too late for Terry, who said he’d not got his head around the one-on-one contests yet, or Naomi Folkard who let nervousness get in the way of her talent.

If ever a sport needed a good psychologist to give them strategies for dealing with those things, it’s archery.

Like target shooting, it’s a sport you play as much against yourself as the person standing next to you.

The Grand National Archery Society has some thinking to do, as do the other sports who’ve missed their medal targets here.

UK Sport has a much publicised “no compromise” policy when it comes to funding sport.

Archery will be among those nervously awaiting the outcome of the divvy-up of cash for London 2012.

Beijing

One of the great inventions of the ancient Chinese world was gunpowder.

So it’s not a great surprise that the first Olympic champion of the Beijing Games is very likely to be a Chinese shooter.

Du Li is the defending champion in the women’s 10m air rifle (yes, I know that you don’t need gunpowder to shoot an air rifle).

I’m expecting to see her crowned champion again at around 11am local time (4am UK time) on the first morning of the Games, surrounded by ecstatic local fans.

I went out to the shooting venue in the Shijingshan district on the outskirts of Beijing.

It’s actually more like two venues - the Beijing Shooting Range Hall, which hosts the rifle and pistol events, and the Beijing Shooting Range Clay Target Field, which is where the shotgun shooters will do their stuff.

It’s a huge complex - and the envy of British Shooting’s performance director John Leighton-Dyson.

He’s put together a team which includes Sydney Olympic champion Richard Faulds, European champion Steve Scott, double Commonwealth champion Charlotte Kerwood, and world record holder Elena Little.

But they’ve been called together from all the four corners of the globe.

There’s no elite shooting centre in the UK, so all the top Brits end up following their coaches to Italy, Germany, Finland, or even the USA, where rifle shooter Jon Hammond is a coach at the University of West Virginia.

The National Shooting Centre at Bisley doesn’t have an indoor facility up to international standards - so winter training there is out.

The GB shooting community had been hoping the 2012 Olympics would give them the chance to build a brand new home for elite shooting - or see Bisley upgraded to a top-class competition venue.

But instead, it’ll be held at Woolwich, in a structure which will be taken down after the games - so no long lasting legacy for the sport there.

And then there’s the problem of pistols.

Since the Dunblane massacre of 1996, and the Firearms Amendment Act of 1997 which followed, it’s been illegal to own a cartridge-fired handgun in the mainland UK. As a result, a whole generation of pistol shooters had to give up the sport or move abroad.

It’s a hugely emotive issue, of course.

No-one is suggesting the sacrifice of those people is on anything like the scale of those who lost loved ones at Dunblane.

But Leighton-Dyson says the handgun ban hasn’t exactly made the streets safer - and countries where gun crime is far worse than the UK haven’t had what he describes as a “knee-jerk reaction” to similar atrocities.

You may have little sympathy with his view.

You may well think it’s ludicrous to suggest that introducing more young people to guns is a good idea.

But you get the sense that any British medal success on the shooting range over the next week or so will be in spite of, rather than because of the system.

Updated：2007-08-17

(BEIJING, August 16) — The Clay Target Field (CTF) has been delivered to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad.

Located at Shijingshan District in west Beijing, the venue will produce five gold medals in clay target competitions, including men’s trap, women’s trap, men’s double trap, men’s skeet and women’s skeet.

The 2008 shooting program will have three events: rifle, pistol and clay target.

Olympic competition begins August 9 through 17, 2008 as shooters will vie for a total of 15 gold medals.

Shooting first appeared as an Olympic sport in 1896. Women were first allowed to compete in 1968, when Mexico, Peru and Poland entered one female contestant each. In 1984, the International Shooting Federation introduced separate events for women. Between 1984 and 1992, the number of women’s events has gradually increased.

In addition, several of the events on the program remained open to both men and women. Since the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, men’s events have been separated from women’s.

Bird’s eye view of CTF from its stands

Starting point decorated after the model of Great Wall

Clay target storage

CTF stand

Workers are weeding the lawn.