From the ISSF website (with permission):

The 51st ISSF World Championship in all Shooting events officially kicked off in Granada, Spain, as the Opening Ceremony took place last night, Sunday, September 7, at the Teatro del Generalife of the Alhambra.

Over 2000 athletes coming from 94 countries are participating in the competition, held at the CEAR de Tiro Olimpico Juan Carlos I in Las Gabias, Granada, from the 7th through the 20th of September.

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The best shooting sport athletes of the world are here. Olympic and Continental Champions, title defenders, World Cup heroes, senior experts and YOG medallists: they are all competing to become the new World Champions and to secure a ticket to Brazil.

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For the first time in the history of the ISSF, Junior finals will be staged during this World Championship.

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The first medals and quota places will be awarded at today's 10m Air Rifle Men final, at 1.30 PM (Spanish time).

Live TV footage will be broadcasted via Eurovision and on the ISSF YouTube channel.

You can find live updates on the event on the ISSF website, Facebook page and Twitter profile; the same goes for the Organizing Committee, the Royal Spanish Shooting Federation (website, Facebook, Twitter). To find out even more and join the conversation, use the hashtag #GranWCH14.

First results are in for the 50m Mens Pistol Elimination...

In case nobody's heard that bit, Bubnovich is currently shooting that final at 39 years old. THERE'S HOPE YET!

Ugh, I do not like this new cheer-while-they're-shooting-instead-of-waiting-till-afterwards bit, especially that clown with the (muted) air horn...

Shoot-off between Kim and Liu... goes to Kim (10.7 v 9.4 and you could see it in Liu's face and eye that he wasn't handling the pressure as well).

That's France, Belarus, Russia and China btw.

(Oh, and the 39-year old just drilled a 10.9 to move up to 5th place...)

Bubnovich now 0.1 points from elimination on the next round...

Nice to see that Steyr in action from Kruglov, but he's now facing elimination in the next round. Cao goes out on this round.

Kruglov is 0.1 points ahead of Bubnovich; the next shot decides who gets a medal and who goes home with (just!) a quota place...

And no, Bubnovich can't make up that point so the 39-year-old goes out with a bronze medal and a quota place (after starting off badly and falling from his third place at the end of qualifying), to leave the 18-year-olds fight it out for gold, with 0.8 points in it...

And Louginets fluffed the last shot too so he gets Silver and a quota place for Russia, while Yang (who just won the Youth Games) takes gold and the quota place for China.

Still don't think this finals format is a good one, I have to say. It's very good at focussing pressure on individuals by dropping people out, but it doesn't seem to be able to ratchet up the pressure any better than the old format and it's having to resort to letting the crowd yell in the middle of the shooting to do it. I mean, that's cheating, if you'd let the crowd yell in the old format like that, you'd have just as much pressure if not more (as the London Games showed repeatedly).

From the ISSF website (with permission):

YOG Champion Yang (CHN) wins the first Gold medal and Olympic Quota of Granada



He was the favorite, and he did not delude the expectation of the shooting sport fans. Yang Haoran, 18, from the People's Republic of China, won the first Gold medal of the 51st ISSF World Championship in all Shooting events in Granada, Spain, claiming the world champion title at today's 10m Air Rifle Men final.

Next to the Gold medal, he pocketed one of the six Olympic Quota places – the entry ticket to Rio 2016 – up for grabs at today's final.

“This is my Golden cake!” Yang said. “Today, in China, we celebrate the mid-autumn fest. That's a traditional occasion for family reunions, and we use to share the so-called moon cakes. Well... I am not in China, I won't get a moon cake today. So I want to share this victory with my parents. This medal is a golden cake for them.”

Ranked second in the world, Yang Haoran, arrived here in Granada after a huge victory at the Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, in front of his supporters.

Here in Granada, he qualified for the the final match in the best way, by setting a new Junior World Record of 632.1 points.

After a slow start in the final, he climbed up the scoreboard eventually overtaking Nazar Louginets, 25, of the Russian Federation after the 12th shot. From there on, he took-off, nailing a series of exceptional shots that lifted him upon the highest step of the podium with 207.9 points and 1.9 points of advantage on his Russian opponents.

“The World Championship is a huge competition. The best shooters of the world are here. I felt the pressure of the match at the beginning of the final, but then I zeroed in and I was able to climb up on top.” Yang said.

“I am honored that I claimed the first Olympic quota for my country.” He commented about winning a Quota place for Rio 2016.
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Today's Bronze medal went to Vitali Bubnovic, 39, from Belarus, a three-time Olympian (2004, 2008, 2012), who confirmed to be one of the best rifle shooters of the world by finishing upon today's podium with 184.9 points.

The top-6 athletes out of the 8 finalists were awarded an Olympic Quota place. Following Yang, Louginets and Bubnovic, three quotas went to Russia's Sergey Kruglov, 29 (fourth with 163.7 points), to the 2006 Junior World Championship bronze medallist Cao Yifei, 26, from the People's Republic of China (fifth with 143.8 points) and to France's 25-year old Jeremy Monnier (sixth with 121.7 points).

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The next medals will be assigned tomorrow, at the 50m Pistol Men Junior final taking place at 12.00.

IRLConor wrote: »

shooting the new format is way more interesting than the old one

To which I have two responses:

1. I don't want interesting from my adrenal glands, I want interesting from the accuracy level I like to know if I look at the final scores that the scores from today and the scores from last year are directly comparable; with the current system, it's far harder to do that than with the old system;
2. Interesting doesn't mean that the best shooter wins. This thing of dropping the lead you build up in qualifications and starting from zero is about as braindead an idea as the crap they're getting with the stiffness gauge. Hell, I could probably ignore the first point if it wasn't for that...

IRLConor wrote: »

Besides, from a physiological point of view, the difference due to stress isn't as big as it appears. Try wearing a heart rate monitor during a match and subsequent final and you'll see.

I've done that (seriously, there's not much Matt didn't try. I'm constantly glad that core temperature isn't a big factor in our shooting...). And I got asked "what's that weird thing" by another shooter completely without irony while he was rigged out in spandex and canvas and leather...
Thing is, when I started shooting it was considered very impolite to make noise during the shooting section of the finals, even to applaud a 10.9 early. People were looked at and tut-tutted And that's just not going away. It's not so much stress as it is annoyance caused by believing that the cheering people are a bunch of nekulturny yobs that the RO should be shushing. It's sortof like a librarian's version of Get Off My Lawn...

I don't understand your comment about the comparability of finals from year to year. (Also, given the number of outdoor finals ranges it's a foolish thing to do for the 50m disciplines.)

Yeah, the outdoor events rather mess it up (hard to compare your shoot in DRC last tuesday to the Milan World Cup when they had a lightning strike on the range for example) but for the indoor events, I used to be able to look at a match result from UCD and get a good idea of where it'd place me in an international match - you can still do that for the qualification rounds, but when you get into the finals it's a lot more random. If I shoot a 102.9 in a training finals in the old system, I know what that means in relation to the international circuit and how far off I am from where I need to be. Today, that's just not possible because the finals have gone from being a shoulder-to-shoulder test like the qualifications still are, where your final score is entirely down to your efforts; to being a head-to-head event where your final rank is all that counts and it's determined by other people's performance versus yours for a specific shot. That's a massive shift in the ethos of the event. And I don't like it. And yes, Get Off My Lawn, but I'm still gonna complain because that was something I really loved about our sport - it hadn't changed the fundamental non-confrontational nature of the match. We all stood there, we all shot the same course of fire, your final score was entirely in your own hands, the fight was entirely with yourself and yeah we looked at rankings to give out the medals but the "how good am I?" question wasn't anything to do with those medals and you had a good solid metric for that question if you wanted to see how you were doing against, say, Sidi. You don't have that in the finals anymore (you still do for qualifications and to be honest, they're the thing I look at most these days, I tend to ignore the finals when wondering who's the best shooter on the range).

The best shooter does win.

Not always, because...

In general, the reset to zero doesn't matter. Either you're much better than your competitors and hence will beat them anyway or you're about the same as your competitors and hence a lead would be so small that it wouldn't help.

...in an international match, that's often the case but not always. We've seen 10m finals where shooters like Gonci were going into the finals having qualified in second or third place with a good lead on (say) 8th place; but because he had one or two bad shots in the beginning he got eliminated and then we saw the other shooters have bad shots afterwards but not get eliminated because of the timing of those shots. If they'd shot those bad shots when Gonci shot his bad shots, then they'd be eliminated and he wouldn't be (I'm using Gonci as an example, but it's happened to others too).

In the old format, if everyone had a bad, it didn't matter to the final rankings because everyone had the same number of shots and you had a statistically better idea of who was shooting better by the end of it. Now, not all shooters have the same number of shots and if every finalist has one bad shot, then their rank is going to be heavily dependent on when that bad shot happens. (And when you remember that "bad shot" can just mean a 10.1 instead of a 10.9, well, now you can be sure everyone's going to shoot at least one bad shot). And it's entirely possible to eliminate shooter A for one bad shot while shooter B goes on to have two worse shots and still rank higher, which wouldn't have happened in the old system. We saw that yesterday in fact; Louginets' last two shots earned him a silver medal, but they were worse shots than any of Bubnovich's bad shots; but because of the elimination, we only know that Louginets was ahead of Bubnovich when Bubnovich was eliminated; if they'd shot the traditional ten-shot finals, given the performances they showed in the finals, I'd lay even odds on Bubnovich taking home the silver medal and Louginets taking bronze.

And that's just the international circuit don't forget, where the standard is very high compared to the domestic circuit; on the domestic circuit this is all amplified, to the point where we've seen some truly silly results before that just would never have happened in the old system.

It just feels like the format of the finals is putting spectator excitement above getting the most accurate determination of skill.

First series starting in 50m Mens Pistol now...

Live results being updated here by the way.

Second series finished, Jin's moved to 2nd place, Pang has taken first...

And Kim goes out on the first elimination. Pang's in 1st, Jin's hanging on to 2nd place, Rai in 3rd.

Matsura goes out on this elimination, his 10.6 just 0.1 too low to beat Korostylov's 7.7...

Interesting age range here btw, Jin's in his mid-30s while Korostylov's 16...

Korostylov goes out on this elimination on a 10.1.
Rai's 2 points ahead of Hoang going into this series before the next elimination.

0.2 between Pang and Rai now.

Last shot...

The Irish shotgun shooters seem to be having a very solid day out there as well; Colin Tanner's on 97/100 while Philip Murphy and Derek Burnett are on 95/100 each, with 25 clays left to go each. The top eight in the field are all on 99/100 or 100/100 though, so a finals place may not be on the cards. Colin might place in the top 30 though, and the team was in 11th place before today's rounds started, so there might be something there.

And stealing the show, Ian O'Sullivan is currently in 8th place in the Junior Trap event, which is stonkingly good...

The videos of the events are starting to show up on the ISSF youtube channel (love that idea, best thing yet from them). Here's yesterdays 10m Mens Air Rifle Finals:



And today's 50m Mens Pistol Finals: