Alexander wrote:Those who would like a bit more of "spectator appeal" will doubtlessly be glad to hear that the European Shooting Confederation - maybe after having looked at the German Bundesliga - has taken up the idea now, and has added a new separate "Top Gun" event in this style to the Meraker ECs:
That the ESC is looking to the Bundesliga is quite obvious considering their
ESC Youth League, which I hope has come to stay and also hope that the next season will feature some of the top countries missing from the first one (where were Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, the Czech Republic?). Granted, the 3-on-3 format makes it a little less open and interesting than the Bundesliga's 5-on-5, but I still think it's a great thing.
Regarding the actual Top Gun competition, I think it's really nice that the ESC is trying new formats, but I have some doubts about this particular format. Having some of the rules "at the discretion of the host" does not seem very objective, and especially I think it's a major mistake to dim down the monitors. What we need in order to be interesting, even more than knock-out competitions, is immediate response to what we actually do. Not someone telling the spectators or the media afterwards who had the better shot, but actually being able to show the hits as soon as they are made. This has been our greatest shortcoming in the past, and choosing not to use the power of electronic targets to overcome it is just wrong. Note, I haven't seen much of the competitions. I have watched the official video (almost at the bottom
here), and it gives an impression of the general spirit of the thing but is extremely poorly produced when it comes to what happens in the actual competition...
On knock-out formats in general, I agree they are a good thing. They have done a lot to promote sports like archery and bowling, which were previously as uninteresting to watch as a shooting match without a final. The new running target format is also great to watch. There are some obstacles though, such as taking a lot of time. The archers shoot 12 arrows in each elimination match, and I think shooters should, at any rate, not accept less than that (it's the shooting Olympics, not the lottery Olympics, right?). So an entire tournament takes a couple of days. This is not so large a problem for archery with only one Olympic event, but more difficult for shooting with 15. Also we have the problem of multi-part events like three positions. (Olympic archery was previously a combination of shooting from 30, 50, 70 and 90 metres. When they switched to knock-out matches, they also dropped everything but the 70-metre distance. Would we really be willing to drop our "blue band" event, either in favour of a kneeling-only one or in favour of dropping the kneeling position entirely from the Olympics?)
At the end of the day, I think the Olympic format we have now is pretty fine for the precision events. As far as the 25-metre events are concerned, we are in much worse shape. The finals in these events, which really could and
should be media-friendly, are almost impossible to follow. Switching to knock-out formats, only having one shooter shooting at a time (again, like the archers), and perhaps dropping the decimals (great for precision events, but making it harder to keep track in the fast pace) would potentially make these boring things really fun to watch. The
perfect pistol event for television would certainly be 5-shot air pistol on falling targets with a man-to-man single elimination format, yes? Each match consisting of, say, 5-6 series. I can't believe the ISSF 5-shot air pistol rules don't already suggest that.
