Competitive shooting, an activity with an estimated 5 million participants worldwide, has been dropped from the roster of sports to be included in the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. This news, which came just before Christmas, has caused dismay in the shooting community in the UK and overseas, especially in India, where shooting has accounted for more than a quarter of all the medals the country has won at the games. According to the organisers the decision was heavily influenced by a desire to make the games available to those in the West Midlands, on which basis the only shooting venue suitable – Bisley in Surrey, was deemed too distant; however, there will be some in the shooting community, who will detect the guiding hand of political correctness behind the announcement. That suspicion is understandable if misplaced. Many will recall the failure of the 2002 Games organisers in Manchester to insist that the BBC cover the shooting from Bisley. At the time the Corporation claimed that the logistics and cost of the 20 staff necessary to provide that coverage were beyond its resources; an argument that seemed somewhat thin given that just two weeks earlier the Corporation had been able to send more than 600 staff to the Glastonbury Festival.
Whilst it is only fair that one of the governing criteria of the events chosen for inclusion at any games should be the accessibility for spectators, it is equally the case that they should represent the best opportunity for member countries to compete with one another and in that regard shooting has an admirable record of witnessing smaller nations triumph against bigger and better financed ones. In this regard the organisers could usefully take a pair of pruning shears to the swimming events. A closed shop for all but a handful of nations – in the 10 games held since 1978, six countries have shared more than eighty per cent of the medals – swimming garners a huge chunk of the Games budget. That it is massively overstuffed with events little different from one another, leads to a handful of the better athletes (that is to say those benefiting from generously sponsored intensive training) gathering up numerous medals and, in the process offering limited spectator appeal. Alas, swimming curtailed or not there is unlikely to be any change of mind and, come 2022, shooters must reconcile themselves to being spectators.