Gender equality, which is on the agenda of the Olympic movement, has always been a hallmark of shooting. Until the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, women were allowed to compete with men in the same events, although on only two occasions did they medal: in Montreal 1976 with the American Margaret Murdock, silver in the 50m rifle 3-positions, and in Barcelona 1992 with the Chinese Zhang Shan, gold in skeet.
In Los Angeles, the first three women's events were introduced in 1984: 10-meter air rifle, 25-meter pistol and 50m rifle 3-positions. Skeet and trap remained mixed events. In Atlanta in 1996, the women's double trap made its appearance and, at the following Olympic Games in Sydney, women's trap and skeet were also introduced.
At the Tokyo Games, two men's events (free pistol and double trap) leave the programme to make way for three mixed events, featuring a national team composed of one male and one female athlete, designed to ensure precisely the gender equality so much praised and sought after by the IOC. These are the mixed trap, 10-meter air rifle and 10-meter air pistol events. China wins the first two mixed team shooting titles ever held at the Olympic Games, in Tokyo, Tuesday 27 July, 2021. Ranxin Jiang and Wei Pang defeated Vitalina Batsarashkina and Artem Chernousov of the ROC (Russian Olympic Committee) 16-14 in the 10-meter air pistol mixed gold medal final. In the 10-meter air rifle mixed team final, Qian Yang and Haoran Yang beat Americans Mary Tucker and Lucas Kozeniesky 17-13. It was the second gold for Qian who also won the individual air rifle competition.
The trap mixed team makes its debut at Tokyo 2021 on Saturday 31 July. The Spanish pair of Alberto Fernandez and Fátima Gálvez won the gold medal, defeating San Marino's Alessandra Perilli (individual bronze) and Gian Marco Berti. In Paris 2024 there will again be a mixed event, but the discipline is skeet. It is not known whether there will be alternation in future editions, as would be logical to expect.
The first mixed team event at the Paris 2024 Olympics
The mixed 10-meter air rifle qualification is the first event of Olympic shooting: it will be held from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. on 27 July, the day after the opening of the Games. The final is scheduled for the following day from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m., with prize-giving 10 minutes after the final: these will be the first shooting medals awarded in Paris. The mixed 10-meter air pistol qualification is scheduled for 29 July from 9:15 to 9ç45 a.m., with the final the following day from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m., followed by the prize-giving ceremony.
The mixed team skeet will be contested in a single day, after the individual competition, on 5 August 2024 from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. for the qualifications, and from 3 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. for the medals, again at the National Shooting Centre in Châteauroux.
The National Olympic Committees may enter a maximum of two teams in each of the mixed team competitions, comprising the same athletes who have qualified and are eligible to compete in the individual events.
In the event that the number of teams entered in the mixed team event exceeds eighteen, the Qualifying Ranking for the Olympic Games (QROG) will be used to determine the final list of entrants. The combined number of points according to the QROG in individual events (produced on 9 June 2024) for both members of the mixed team will be taken into account.
Competition modes in the of 10m air pistol, 10m air rifle and skeet mixed team
For both 10m air pistol and 10m air rifle the two competitors each fire 30 shots separately in 30 minutes in qualification: the ranking is based on the sum of the two scores, the rifle ranking with decimal scores. The second two ranked teams compete for bronze and the first two teams for gold. In both 10m air pistol and 10m air rifle, the finals are disputed with decimals, with rounds of one single shot per athlete. The pair of the same nationality with the highest sum of the two scores gets 2 points, in the event of a tie the two pairs each get 1 point. The challenge for bronze or gold is won by the team that reaches 16 points first; in the event of a tie, the competition proceeds for one more round and possibly more rounds until the tie is broken.
In the mixed team skeet event, each shooter fires 75 rounds in three series of 25 rounds each, following the rules of the individual event, then on all eight stations. The four best teams then compete in the medal round, shooting twice only from stations 3, 4 and 5. First the teams ranked third and fourth for bronze and then the teams ranked first and second for gold and silver. Each confrontation is contested in the same way: each shooter shoots two doubles (a 'normal' one, i.e. Pull first, and a reverse one, i.e. Mark first) and each team takes turns to shoot first, accumulating the number of clay pigeon targets hit in all six stations. The theoretical maximum is therefore 48.
For all three mixed events, the qualifiers stipulate that the members of the pair are not side-by-side, which is the case in the finals only, when the coach can follow the team directly and ask for even one timeout to talk to his/her shooters.
Paris Olympics: will it be a clash between East and West?
There are many teams that can count on at least one pair, while only China, India and the Republic of Korea have two pairs in both 10m air pistol and 10m air rifle; therefore, these countries will have a much better chance of winning the gender equality medals. The Indian pairs in mixed 10m air rifle have already been unveiled and will be Elavenil Valarivan with Sandeep Singh and Ramita Ramita Jindal with Arjun Babuta, the Chinese ones will probably be Yuting Huang with Liao Sheng and Jiayu Han with Linshu Du, the Korean ones Daehan Cohe-Hajun Park and Hyojin Ban-Jihyeon Keum. The Indian pairs in mixed 10m air pistol will be Sarabjot Singh with Manu Bhaker and Arjun Singh Cheema with Rhythm Sangwan, the Chinese ones will be Yu Xie-Bowen Zhang and Ranxin Jiang-Xue Li, the Korean ones Yeongjae Cho-Wonho Lee and Yeji Kim-Ye Jin Ho.
In the mixed 10m air rifle there will also be two US pairs consisting of Rylan Kissell, Ivan Roe, Sagen Maddalena and Mary Tucker and also two Turkish pairs consisting of Yusuf Dikec, Ismail Keles, Sevval Ilayda Tarhan and Sima Yilmaz in the mixed 10m air pistol.
This year in mixed 10m air rifle in the World Cup trials the British pair Seonaid McIntosh and Dean Bale (Cairo), the Germans Anna Janssen and Maximilian Dallinger (Granada) and, twice (Baku and Munich), the Chinese Huang and Sheng won. Also doing well were the Norwegian pair Jeannette Hegg Duestad and Jon-Hermann Hegg, who won the ISSF Shooting Final Olympic Qualification Championship in Rio de Janeiro (BRA), ahead of France's Oceanne Muller and Lucas Bernard Denis Kryzs. In the 10m air pistol mixed team event in Granada, Germany's Sandra Reiz and Michael Schwald won; in Baku, Turkey's Ylmaz and Keles
According to the Olympic Qualification Tracker, only the United States, Egypt, France, Greece, India, Italy, the Republic of Korea and Peru have secured at least one individual skeet quota of each gender for Paris 2024. This guarantees them the opportunity to be included in the final list of 18 teams for the mixed team skeet event in Paris 2024. But among them, only the United States and Italy have been awarded two places in both men's and women's skeet, thanks to their outstanding individual performances in the Olympic qualifying competitions. They will therefore be able to present two pairs and aim to win the medals at stake.
Austen Smith and Vincent Hancock took the title in the mixed team skeet event at the ISSF World Championships held in the capital of Azerbaijan in August 2023. And on 18 June, they won the gold medal in the mixed team skeet at the World Cup in Lonato (ITA), defeating the Kuwaiti team with Abdullah Alrashidi and Eman Al Shamaa 44 to 41. During the final, Hancock missed only his last shot, while Smith made 21 of 24. Hancock, who took part in four editions of the Games, already stood on the skeet podium at Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Tokyo 2020. At the 2023 Pan American Games he secured the gold medal with Dania Jo Vizzi, while Austen Smith won bronze with Dustan Taylor. The latter, however, will not be going to Paris, despite having won a place: 23-year-old Conner Lynn Prince from Texas was preferred over him. Team USA is the favourite to win Olympic gold in this new event, but Italy can also boast two ultra-competitive teams, although coach Andrea Benelli has not yet released his reservations about the pairings. He can however count on Diana Bacosi and Gabriele Rossetti, who have won everything everything worth winning in individual and also in pairs, world gold in 2019 and world silver in 2022, then on Martina Bartolomei and Tammaro Cassandro, who have less top-level experience in the mixed, but will certainly know how to assert themselves.
Britain's Amber Rutter Hill and Ben Llewellin won the title at the 2022 World Cup in Osijek, Croatia, and at the 2023 World Cup in Baku, AZE, they took bronze. Reem Al Sharshani and Rashid Saleh Al-Athba of Qatar, Chile's Francisca Crovetto Chadid and Hector Andres Flores Barahona and France's Lucie Anastassiou and Eric Delauney did well in this year's World Cup. Australia, Egypt and the Czech Republic also have top-level Skeet athletes and will have their say in Paris 2024.
During the weeks leading up to the Paris 2024 Olympics, we will regularly publish articles dedicated to the Olympic Games and shooting sports. We will make you live the Olympic dream until the lighting of the brazier and also afterwards, when it is time for the medals. Stay tuned!
To read previous articles click here:
- It will be a global celebration of sports: here's what to know about the Paris 2024 Olympic Games for sport shooters
- Ten days of passion! Shooting competitions at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games from July 27 to August 5 in Châteauroux
- Paris 2024 Olympic Games: sport shooting events to begin on July 27, 2024 – Media coverage and time schedule
- Interview with Luciano Rossi, President of ISSF
- Shooting events at the Olympic Games: 10 meter air pistol, show and thrill are guaranteed
- Road to Paris – Trap: in the beginning they were glass target balls, which turned into clay pigeons
- Paris Olympics: the ISSF House in Châteauroux
- Shooting events at the Paris 2024 Olympics, pistols "on fire" at 25 meters
- 50m rifle three-positions: the most technical shooting event at the Paris Olympic Games
- Skeet, it's all about "swing" in the popular clay target shooting discipline
- The lists of athletes who will compete for Olympic medals
- 10 meter air rifle
