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:

https://twitter.com/ISSF_Shooting/status/509726119168593920

O Sullivan (IRL) and Wallace (AUS) still hold a perfect score: 10 hits after 10 targets at Junior Men Trap semifinal

https://twitter.com/ISSF_Shooting/status/509727365959012352

O Sullivan (IRL) and Wallace (AUS) take over Junior Men's Trap semifinal, they score 13 hits to enter gold medal match

Gold or silver for Ireland! Huzzah!

Results are going up here, by the way:
http://www.issf-sports.org/competitions/results/detail.ashx?cshipid=930&resultkey=3b3b303b54523132353b343b4b3b493b313b303b30

Gold medal shootoff now underway...