The average person probably did not notice last week, but the International Sport Shooting Foundation, the governing body for Olympic shooting events, decided they needed to implement their own version of Title IX parity in the Olympics.
As you may know, Title IX was intended to insure that girls in high school and college were being given equal opportunity to compete in sports while in school. However, as is usually the case, the NCAA and other organizations controlling high school and college sports took the "kill a mosquito with a sledgehammer" approach to enforcing the rule. So gone were men's swimming and wrestling and other legendary college sports teams to make way for competitive tumbling and cheerleading teams . . . that is, when the schools could manage to entice girls who weren't really interested in sports to get involved anyway.
Like most efforts in social engineering, it's a f*cking mess.
And so is this current debacle.
In the name of diversity and inclusion and every other buzz word popular with today's SJW crowd, there will no longer be a Men's Double Trap competition or a Men's 50 meter prone rifle competition or a Men's 50 meter pistol competition. Seeing a pattern here?
It's not known to the average viewer, but the Men's 50m pistol event, commonly referred to by competitors as Free Pistol is one of the oldest and most famous shooting events in the Olympics, dating back to the 1890's. The f*cking 1890's!!! That's a 120+ years of Olympic history folks!!
Yes, yes, by all means, let's toss a historic shooting event on the trash heap simply because women can't or don't care to compete in it!
It should be noted that there are women's pistol events in the Olympics -- air pistol and sport pistol, the latter being a version of what men compete in as centerfire pistol (not in the Olympics though, only women's sport pistol is an event), the difference being women shoot a .22cal pistol in sport pistol where men use a pistol chambered for centerfire cartridges. Also, in my competitive experience, in state championships and smaller matches, the ladies compete on equal footing with the guys in all disciplines, the exception being the previously mentioned sport/cf pistol division.
But to replace those three venerable Olympic shooting competitions we now have the ridiculous events of Mixed Gender Team events in Trap, 10 meter air rifle, and 10 meter air pistol.
ISSF President Olegario Vázquez Raña breathlessly let the world know that his organization conducted an exhaustive two year study to come up with this abomination, noting that this was a fundamental step forward for shooting sports and that promoting inclusion and gender equality by insuring that there are exactly the same number of events available to men and women will support further growth in shooting sports around the world.
No words of condolences have been offered to the 30 Olympic hopefuls who won't have the opportunity to realize their dream of becoming an Olympian because the number of athletes will drop from 390 to 360 under this change. And I may have missed it, but to my knowledge, there hasn't been some anguished outcry from female athletes that they are not fairly represented in the shooting sports in the Olympics. I mean, basically what the ISSF is doing here is adding three women's events to the schedule. Why not just add a Women's 50m pistol, prone rifle and double trap to the list of events.
You know the answer to that, and it has nothing to do with inclusion. Quite the opposite in fact.
I'm also wondering what will come when we have a mixed gender team totally composed of biological males but with the supposed female member(s) being someone who only identifies as female. We have to be inclusive after all, right Mr. Rana? And in my experience as a competitive shooter, I've seen some good women shooters, but for the most part, the guys are better, far better, at the pistol events than the gals.
This could start to look like these city and state track and field events where boys are winning the girls events and championships, because they supposedly identify as female.
What bullsh*t! Almost makes me glad I cannot compete anymore. By the way, to their credit, USA Shooting, the sanctioning body for US Olympic shooting sports categorically opposes these changes and notes they had nothing to do with the decision to alter the make up of the Olympic shooting schedule of events.
Good for them.
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