Everything You Need to Know About the Olympic Shooting Events at the 2024 Paris Games

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While more mainstream sports usually get most of the attention during the Summer Olympic Games, we know the shooting sports are the events to watch — even if you have to stream them live at 3 a.m. The events are a hell of a lot of fun to watch and the United States always dominates, which is pretty cool, too.

Since the U.S. first competed in the modern Olympic games in 1896, our country has earned a stunning 116 medals for shooting sports. (The closest nation behind us is China, with a paltry 67.) The last time our country’s best competitive shooters toed the firing line in the 2020 Tokyo games, they logged the best performance since 1964, bringing home a total of six medals, including three gold medals for William Shaner in Men’s Air Rifle, Amber English in Women’s Skeet, and Vincent Hancock in Men’s Skeet. 

This year in Paris, 340 athletes from the world will compete across 15 shooting events, all striving for a spot on the podium. On Team USA, Hancock returns looking to join an exclusive club of four-time gold medal winners, and he’ll have two more chances at the Paris games, thanks to the introduction of the new Mixed Team Skeet event. 

Let’s take a look at the shooting events in the 2024 Paris games, which begin Friday July 26 and run through Aug. 11, and see what the Team USA shooters are up to. 

Table of Contents

Read through the whole story or click on one of these topics to jump to it below.

• Shooting Events at the Paris Olympics
• Team USA’s Key Shooting Athletes
• The Guns of the Olympics
• What to Know When You Watch Trap, Skeet, and More
• When to Watch the Olympic Shooting Events
• How to Stream the Olympic Shooting Events

What Shooting Events Are at the Paris Olympics?

Two temporary competition halls and an outdoor facility have been constructed at the Terrain des Essences in La Courneuve, just north of Paris. These will serve as the shooting ranges for this year’s games. You can jump to the basics of each event here.

Men’s Shooting Events 

• 10m Air Rifle
• 50m Rifle 3 Positions
• 10m Air Pistol
• 25m Rapid Fire Pistol
• Trap
• Skeet

Women’s Shooting Events

• 10m Air Rifle
• 50m Rifle 3 Positions
• 10m Air Pistol
• 25m Pistol
• Trap
• Skeet 

Mixed Team Shooting Events

• 10m Air Rifle
• 10m Air Pistol
• Skeet (New for 2024)

Who Are Team USA’s Key Shooting Athletes?

A total of 17 Americans will be competing in Paris shooting events. Everyone around the world will have their eyes on U.S. skeet champ Vincent Hancock, 35, who set the shooting world on fire with his incredible comeback to win gold in Tokyo. This year he’s participating in Men’s and Mixed Skeet, and he’s looking to make Olympic history by becoming one of only six Americans to win four or more gold medals in skeet events. 

In addition to his 2020 win in Tokyo, Hancock previously took home gold in men’s skeet at the games in Beijing in 2008 (when he was just 19 years old) and London in 2012. 

“I have to be comfortable being uncomfortable,” Hancock told NBC Olympics. “Being at the Games, there’s more pressure and more nerves than you’re gonna face in any other sport because it’s once every four years. Only Olympians truly understand what it’s like to face Olympic pressure. We don’t have the Super Bowl every year in our sport, we have the Olympics and it is only once every four years and our careers are based on that one moment in time, every four years.”

Keep an eye out for 22-year-old Mary Tucker, who is making her second Olympic appearance after winning silver in Air Rifle in Tokyo and will be on the hunt for her first gold. Tucker was once referred to as the “rebel child” of shooting, according to Team USA, because she quit her high school team and taught herself to shoot by watching YouTube videos.

Expect return appearances from these former Olympians:

• Alexis Lagan (Women’s 10m Air Pistol). Lagan is from Boulder City, Nevada.
• Henry Leverett (Men’s 25M Rapid Fire Pistol). Leverett and his brother competed together in Tokyo and they shoot together on the Ohio State team.
• Sagen Maddalena (10m Air Rifle, Women’s 50m Rifle 3 Positions, Mixed Team 10m Air). Maddalena walked on to one of the best rifle programs in the country at Alaska Fairbanks, and red-shirted her first season in 2013 before joining the Army in 2019 and getting assigned to the USAMU International Team.
• Derrick Mein (Men’s Trap). Mein is a hunter and fisherman from Paola, Kansas
• Austen Smith (Women’s Skeet, Mixed Skeet). At 20, Smith was the youngest shooter on Team USA at the Tokyo games and she’s been coached by Hancock.
• Keith Sanderson (Men’s 25m Rapid Fire Pistol). Sanderson began shooting in 1996 in U.S. Marine Corps matches, and currently serves as chief marksman instructor of the USMC base in Hawaii.

There are some familiar shooters from the 2020 Team USA roster who won’t be competing in Paris, most notably Women’s Skeet gold medalist Amber English, as well as silver medalists Kayle Browning (Trap) and Ali Weisz (10m Air Rifle), bronze medalist Madelynn Bernau (Mixed Trap), William Shaner (Air Rifle), and five others. 

Plenty of New Blood

There are plenty of Team USA Olympic newbies looking to make their names memorable in Paris. Nine shooters in all will be making their Olympic debut in the coming days: 

• Katelyn Abeln (Women’s 10m Air Pistol, Women’s 25m Pistol). The Georgia native got her start shooting BB guns in 4H.
• Will Hinton (Men’s trap). Hinton hails from a family of Georgia bird hunters (his dad was a dog trainer) and he’s now a solider in the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit.
• Rylan Kissell (Men’s 10m Air Rifle, Men’s 50m Rifle 3 Positions, Mixed Team 10m Air Rifle.) Kissell is a fisherman from Colorado who started shooting like most people: with a BB gun at cans in the backyard.
• Ada Korkhin (Women’s 25m Pistol). The 19-year-old from Massachusetts began shooting air pistol when she was nine.
• Ryann Phillips (Women’s Trap). The Texan was on the 2021 National Junior Trap team.
• Conner Prince (Men’s and Mixed Skeet). Prince is a 24-year-old from Texas who has been coached by Hancock.
• Ivan Roe (Men’s 10m Air Rifle, Men’s 50m Rifle 3 Positions, Mixed Team 10m Air Rifle). The Montana native fell in love with shooting when he was seven, after his dad signed him up for hunter education.
• Rachel Tozier (Women’s Trap). Tozier is a specialist in the U.S. Army from Pattonsburg, Missouri.
• Dania Vizzi (Women’s Skeet and Mixed Skeet.) The 29-year-old once qualified for a dance program at Julliard but she preferred to focus on shooting professionally — hence the nickname, “Shooterina.”

The Guns of the Olympics

Olympic shooting events feature smallbore rifles, air rifles, smallbore pistols, air pistols, and shotguns. The three set shooting distances are 10, 25, and 50 meters. Athletes shoot at stationary targets on indoor ranges except for shotgun events, of course, which are held outdoors as olympians shoot at moving clay targets.

Smallbore Rifles

• Single-shot firearms in .22 caliber (or 5.6 mm, since this is a world competition) are used across all rifle events. 

Pistols and Air Pistols

• Single-shot .177 caliber (4.5 mm) air pistols are used for the 10m Air Pistol event. 
• Olympic athletes shoot a .22 caliber (5.6 mm) pistol with a five-round magazine for the Rapid Fire Pistol events. 

Shotgun

• Trap and Skeet shooters use 12-gauge, double-barrel break actions. While that sounds fairly standard, the guns are highly customized and perfectly fit to each athlete. Check out Vincent Hancock’s $15,000 custom Beretta DT11 that he used to win gold at the Tokyo Games.

What to Know About Each Shooting Event

The 2020 Tokyo games (which were actually held in 2021, thanks to COVID) saw the first co-ed event in Olympic shotgunning: the Trap Mixed Team event. For the Paris games, that event has been replaced with the Skeet Mixed Team event, giving Hancock and the other Team USA skeet shooters an additional opportunity to compete for a spot on the podium. 

The Tokyo games also saw the introduction of mixed team events in Olympic air rifle and air pistol events, which are returning in 2024 with 10m competitions for both. 

Meanwhile, the number of athletes participating in shooting events has dropped slightly from 360 shooting olympians in Tokyo to 340 in Paris. Additionally, a new elimination format means all individual-event shooters who advance to a final must start from scratch and hit a specific number of shots in the elimination stages. There are some event-specific regulation changes, too.

Rifle

• 10m Air Rifle: Each shooter has 1 hour and 15 minutes to fire 60 shots at a target from 10 meters.  The eight highest scoring shooters then compete for the podium. The rules are a little different for the 10m Air Rifle Mixed Team event, where teams of one male and one female athlete compete together. Each team member must fire 40 shots within 50 minutes during the qualifying round. Then, the top five teams move on to the final round. 
• 50m Rifle 3 Positions: As the name suggests, shooters fire at a target at 50 meters from three different positions: kneeling, prone, and standing (off hand). Each shooter has 2 hours and 45 minutes to fire 40 shots in each position. The eight highest scoring shooters advance to the medal round.  

Pistol

• 10m Air Pistol: The rules here are the same as 10m Air Rifle. In the solo categories, shooters have 1 hour and 15 minutes to fire 60 shots, with the top eight shooters moving on to the medal round. In the mixed team event, each team member has 1 hour and 15 minutes to fire 40 shots, with the top five teams shooting it out in a final round.  
• 25m Rapid Fire Pistol (Men’s only event): Shooters must fire five shots successively over short periods of time: either 8, 6, or 4 seconds. Qualifiers include two rounds of 30 shots each. The top eight shooters then move on to the final medal round. 
• 25m Pistol (Women’s only event): Like the Rapid Fire event, this competition features two qualifying rounds of 30 shots each. The top eight shooters then move on to the final round. 

Shotgun

In both Skeet and Trap events, shooters fire at a clay that’s 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches) in diameter. The clay is flying just over 60 mph.

• Trap: Shooters fire at a single clay target launched from a trap set at different heights and angles. In qualifying rounds, two shots are allowed at each target. In the final round, only one shot is allowed. There are five rounds total of 25 shots each.  The six best shooters advance to the final round. 

• Skeet
  • Shooters fire in turn from eight different stations. Two clays are released from opposite sides at the same time. Using double-barrel shotguns, each competitor gets one shot at each target. There are five rounds totaling 25 shots each, and the six best shooters advance to the final round. 
  • For the Mixed Skeet event, each team consists of one male and one female shooter from the same nation. In the qualifying round, each member of each team will shoot 75 targets int three rounds of 25 targets each; that’s 150 targets for each team.
  • The six highest scoring teams will advance to the final, which consists of two parts. Final Part 1 decides the winner of the bronze medal while Final Part 2 decides the winners of the gold and silver medals. In each final round, two teams of four athletes will compete on six stations. 

When to Watch the Olympic Shooting Events

If you’re planning to watch these events live, be prepared to wake up in the middle of the night. Almost all of the events begin at either 3 a.m. or 3:30 a.m. EST. We’ve highlighted two notable events to tune into (or watch the replays), but you can find the full schedule of Team USA shooting events here. The Olympics run from July 27 to Aug. 5, with the Opening Ceremonies already underway. 

First up in the Olympic schedule are the Air Rifle and Air Pistol qualifiers followed by finals for the men’s, women’s, and mixed teams. Mary Tucker will be participating in  all three rifle events. Finals for those events are:

• Mixed Team 10M Air Rifle: Sat. July 27 from 4:30-5:50 a.m. EST
• Women’s 10m Air Rifle: Mon. July 29 from 3:15-7:05 a.m. EST
• Women’s 50M Rifle 3 Positions: Fri. Aug. 2 from 3:30-4:50 a.m. EST

To watch Vincent Hancock compete in his two Skeet events, keep an eye on the Men’s Skeet qualifiers, which begin at 3 a.m. EST on Fri. Aug. 2. The Skeet finals air on Sat. Aug. 3 at the end of the broadcast window from 3 to 11:50 a.m. EST. Hancock will get another crack at a medal in the Mixed Team Skeet event; Those qualifiers and finals will air on Mon. Aug. 5 from 3 a.m. to 10:35 a.m. EST.

How to Watch the Olympic Shooting Events

You can catch the live broadcast of the Opening Ceremony (Fri. July 26 at noon EST; re-airs at 7:30 p.m. EST). You can watch the Olympics on local NBC networks, and CNBC and USA Network on cable TV.

Streaming: Peacock app for streaming, NBCOlympics.com, NBC.com, NBC app, NBC Olympics app for iOS or Android. The NBC Olympics app is also available for smart TVs and streaming devices, and is the recommended way to view the games with those devices, according to NBC.

To unlock online viewing within NBC’s apps at NBCOlympics.com or at NBC.com, you must log in using the credentials for your cable, satellite, or telco TV subscription.

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Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/guns/olympic-shooting-events-guide/