What are the Olympics shooting competitors wearing on their faces? | Hacker News Reader

What are the Olympics shooting competitors wearing on their faces?

core77.com

213 pointssurprisetalk127 comments

Sadly doesn’t seem to really get into the details. For target shooting, aperture sights on with the gun or your eyes have a variety of interesting benefits, such as reducing parallax error and providing a better depth of field (bringing the target more into focus when focusing on the front sight).

Here’s a decent overview of the AR15’s classic aperture sight, and the reason why when looking through the sight that simply having the front post roughly centered somehow works better than you’d think: https://thenewrifleman.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-ar15-ir...

What's purpose of the left-eye shield?

I occasionally do competitive matches with handguns (USPSA in the US), so I have some background knowledge. The eye cover is to reduce strain / fatigue from squinting, however it also helps the other eye focus on their aperture sight naturally, thus making it easier to take a more accurate shot (with all of the science behind closing apertures and front sight posts, linked in this thread).

In USPSA, while we don't use eye covers in a match, but a lot of competitors will use them on their dominant eye to practice fast target acquisition, independent of their pistol red dot or iron sights. Translates to very refined muscle memory when you don't need to rely on your optics to align your aim.

In most type of shooting, you're generally NOT closing either of your eyes while aiming. It's counter productive to your situational awareness

A few things. It makes for no distraction in the eye you’re not using, while still allowing you to have both eyes easily open with focus where you need. Keeping both eyes open vastly reduces strain on the facial/eye muscles.

Sometimes a white opaque shield is used, on the theory that allowing light through won’t have potentially negative effects on iris contraction. I can’t speak to the validity of this one.

We use tape over the left eye of my youngest’s eye pro when he’s shooting a rifle. He’s cross eye dominant and scotch tape on the glasses is cheaper than a left handed rifle.

I shoot quite often. If you learn to shoot with your left right shut you will need to calibrate your sight to shoot for something I know as a 'counter-paralax'. When i say "left eye" that might be your right eye, it depends on how you shoot. You cannot calibrate a sight properly without choosing left, right, or having both eyes open...

Both eyes are preferred for a killer, because you want to have awareness. But it is not an easy way to shoot, or train, or learn.

On another note, I had a cal .22 blow on my face once, on a perfectly tuned rifle, and the reason I kept my eye, is because the exit is on the right hand side. Most rifles are build like that.

"Both eyes are preferred for a killer, because you want to have awareness. But it is not an easy way to shoot, or train, or learn."

I think you're entirely wrong, but the sport USPSA is vastly different from any Olympic style shooting you would seen. It's speed and hit factor (that is, the caliber of your gun as a TLDR). Different priorities than Olympic sharpshooting.

You need to take a pistol class from Shrek (sob tactical). He will change your way of thinking about your eyes and shooting

Bloke on the range goes into this in his video[1] on olympic pistol target shooting.

For him it helps to block his non-dominant eye as he has a weak dominant eye.

Also, the pupil responses are linked, so you'd want both eyes to be exposed to similar brightness. So you don't want to close it or wear a patch.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfaK4Hz0Na8

I'm no olympian, but squinting one eye shut can mess up your vision when aiming. Leaving both open takes some extra attention away from the target. I don't shoot competitively, but I leave both eyes open. I assume the same for them.

I teach drawing and my students are required to measure alignment of objects using their pencil as a straight edge whilst looking through one eye. Some students have trouble with this and have to place one hand over there non dominant eye.

Since I lost my left eye I have no trouble looking through only one eye. However, I have acquired plenty of troubles with balance.

I'm not a shooter, but people do the same thing when looking through a telescope, or a microscope with one eyepiece. You learn to ignore the other eye.

Looking through a telescope or microscope isn't a competition sports.

Considering the performance of the silver medalist, maybe thousands of hours of practice makes it moot, if you don't train yourself to require it.

Cargo cult, even at the olympic level, is a thing. See the mustaches that make you swim faster [1]. It wasn't only the Russian's that adopted it.

[1] https://swimswam.com/the-legend-of-the-mustache-in-swimming-...

He didn't reach the final in the men's event, so maybe they just had a good day.

extend your arm, now focus your vision on a tip of your finer, and (still focusing on a finger tip!) try to point your finger just below some small object in the distance of few meters. If you use both your eyes, if done properly it should be impossible because the object you try to point to, but not look at, will be seen double and will move as you move your finger. Then do do same but with one eye closed - now it still should be blurry, but nothing more so you can aim. This is how you aim in shooting (always focusing vision on pistol, never on target) so you need to do it with one eye. You don’t want to keep it shout as this creates additional tension in body, and probably may affect your face after years of training, so simple piece of paper or plastic to shield the eye is enough.

Interesting, I’ve essentially done zero pistol/rifle shooting but I shoot clays regularly and this is pretty much the opposite of the advice you’d give a new clay shooter. Mount the shotgun properly with both eyes open, track the clay, work out the lead, then boom. Is the “focus on the pistol” thing because you’re aiming at a static target?

For precision shooting, the alignment of the sights with each other has a much bigger impact on where you hit than the alignment of the sights with the target. An intuitive explanation for why might be that the distance from either sight to the target is much greater than the distance between the sights, so a misalignment between the sights creates a much larger angle than the same amount of misalignment with the target.

Yes, for pistol shooting iron sights (just learned the english term, that’s what I meant by “focus on pistol” ;) ) are what you have to focus on. The target is black bulls eye, clearly visible on a white background, even if it’s blurry.Then you aim just below the bulls eye - so what you se is black iron sights (vision focus, sharp), then small white gap, then blurry black bulls eye. And then you learn to have all those elements spaced exactly the same on every single repetition.

You don’t have to track target, as it’s always in the same spot.

I know you must know this, but for others reading, this also is not a static view, like in a video game, but the sights are 'swimming' around usually in a figure 8 pattern as your heart beats. It is not just a matter of getting a good sight picture, but breaking the trigger when things aren't perfectly lined up, because by the time the mechanism fires and the projectile leaves the barrel you will no longer be lined up. This is worse for air pistol due to the slow velocity of the pellet.

In other words it is not like you are holding a tiny dot in the exact center of a circle, it is a messy blur of trying to hold 3 things in alignment where the front sight is about as big as the entire bullseye (hence why you aim below, so there is white visible, you would otherwise obscure the target entirely.

If you do it well, you are consistently hitting something the size of the period at the end of this sentence from 10 meters away (again, air pistol).

That’s for bullseye style shooting. In other pistol formats like ipsc sight focus shooting is too slow. Target focused is the way top competitors shoot.

What I’m curious about is the rapid fire Olympic event. It’s not particularly fast as these things go but very accurate (though less so than the other events).

It's basically the same, just with a lot more of a "good enough" attitude to aiming. So you really mostly on a muscle memory to have pistol somewhere in a target, then aim using iron sights. For whole 8,6 or 4s you focus vision on a iron sights. During the first phase - moving your arm up from the 45 degree position, you look in the target direction so you know when to start, then focus your vision on iron sights in the end phase of raising arm motion so you are almost immediately ready to aim and pull the trigger, then just move you eyes to the next target, but with "locked" focus (at the distance of iron sights, not target), so again, arm moves to the target area and you can aim and shoot.

Ex-military guys give the same advice of keeping both eyes open. It doesn't seem to apply to bullseye shooting, though.

Most shut left eye, an eye patch reduces muscle strain as eye doesn't have to close as tightly

And then there's Turkish pistol silver medalist Yusuf Dikec who just wears his regular glasses and foam earplugs and shoots with one hand in his pocket.

https://olympics.com/en/news/yusuf-dikec-turkish-shooting-vi...

It's not unlike the race driver Jacky Ickx who walked to his car at the 1969 24 hours of Le Mans (while all the other drivers were running to their cars), took his time to fasten his seatbelt, and then won the race.

Some competitors are simply king of cools.

Ickx did it in protest though (against FIA's reluctance to increase safety rules in general and against the traditional Le Mans start in particular)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_24_Hours_of_Le_Mans

They all shoot with one hand in their pocket, they aren’t allowed to use two hands so it is a common technique.

Unless you have health issues, for single shots of small calibers you should be far more accurate with one hand compared to two.

A 6 inch .44 Magnum revolver or such beasts is a different story.

Do you have sources? I have a hard time believing it, if you use the second hand just for support and not aim with both hands.

Primary source is myself, I shoot the same programs as those in the olympic, and more.

And sure, if you use it like that it's something else. I was primarily thinking of what's allowed in the programs I know of, where "two hands" means both hands on the gun.

edit: I don't think bracing would make a huge difference anyway, unless you're fairly new. The primary source of error, by far, is due to sight misalignment, not the general direction you're aiming. And bracing would only help with stabilizing the general directionyou aim.

Silver was the mixed team, in the men's event he was 13th.

Still no less of an accomplishment.

His partner didn't wear such eye gear either but she is rarely mentioned.

Did she have a photograph of her taken showing off her swagger that then turned into a meme photo?

Probably why she is rarely mentioned.

she was standing next to him, she also had her hand in her pocket.

It looks sort of funny, synchronized nonchalance.

The only thing about her appearance that might mean why she is rarely mentioned - she was wearing big headphones so she had slightly more gear.

here is a picture of them shooting https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2...

on edit: changed I think she was to just she was, I hadn't gotten the image when I started writing the comment

She has big headphones and a low hat. She’s definitely not putting off the same nonchalant aura.

I mean the big hat is like a baseball cap, that's within the nonchalant part of the Venn diagram, but the headphones are classed as using tools, only no tools and hands in pockets fall in the center of don't give a fuck.

I watched the final match after seeing the memes, another thing the commentators kept saying about the guy (Yusuf Dikec) is that he is 51, an age rarely seen at the highest levels of competition in any sport.

I would’ve expected this to be the norm in shooting sports. Shooting is more skill and experience based, less physically demanding, and age might prove advantageous

Is there any publicly available video of the event?

don't know, not a big olympics person.

Hand in pocket is functional though. Balance or something.

Love how try-hard and over the top the rest of the younger participants ended up looking, admittedly many of them with excessive/unnecessary equipment, compared to him.

Is that really the case though? The only real difference was the eyewear, age, and a bit of an attitude that contrasted with the rest.

I think they also wear fitted jackets that let them tighten their bodies akin to a lifting suit

The rifle shooters wear stiff clothing, while pistol shooters tend to wear looser things (and there are lots of rules around clothes not being allowed to provide support).

This is correct. All pistol shooters just wear shirts. All of them have their hand in their pocket. If you don't have astigmatism you can get away without the fancy eyeglass holder, and just use regular glasses. The lack of blinder is somewhat impressive, because most people will get a headache after too long without an opaque blinder on the off eye.

Meanwhile in rifle it's all $2k kit of rigid jacket and pants. If you aren't using the rigid jacket and pants, you will get absolutely wrecked. Your score will be lower, and your back will get injured in the long run because of the contortionist posting when holding the 13 pound rifle up for hours. It's not possible to be competitive without it.

> All pistol shooters just wear shirts. All of them have their hand in their pocket.

First one I thought of proves you wrong? https://www.npr.org/2024/07/31/g-s1-14616/olympics-paris-sha...

Sure, there will be a few that don't

Though in that specific case, I'm pretty sure she's got part of the hand in the pocket, and that shooter Kim Yeji also does hand in pocket other times, if you've seen her at other issf events (here's a random example):

https://old.reddit.com/r/olympics/comments/1eheidc/olympic_p...

I've also done finger through belt loop, it's basically the same thing. (Guess it wasn't technically a belt loop, but like a utility holder loop, like you'd put a small hammer in on the side of work pants?)

An analogy would be if there was a big news cycle about programmers and people were really shocked about a specific programmer usinv a "text editor", and people went on and on about how that was... except all the other programmers are sitting over there thinking "wait, every programmer uses text editors".

Sure you can find a few that don't, but that's real missing the point.

The ones that got gold against the coll looking ones, were a bald man and a fat lady.

People who don't use equipments inherently have fear of failure.

When they fail, they can say "see? Because I don't have all the fancy equipments".

That's literally the opposite of fear of failure.

People who use equipments actually have fear of failure. Fear of something makes you want to avoid it, and they try avoid failing in case their bare abilities are not good enough

I don't think you understand fear of failure.

Inherently, everyone knows they can lose whatever they do.

People who use equipments and lose would have no excuse why they lose. They are not scared of having no excuse, so they try the hardest.

People who have fear of failure will act like they don't try, so they have an excuse in the case that they lose.

People who fear failure in general don't compete in Olympics.

But going naked eye when everyone else wears equipments is the ultimate not giving a fuck.

Especially because it's not your personal competition and if this costs your country medals people will NOT like you and if you say "ah you know it's just because I didn't wear equipments, which I totally could but didn't" they will not like you more because of it.

I have to assume people who don't use equipment have either arrogance or poverty.

Or fear of failure.

This is a well studied behaviour in students where they act like they don't focus on studying. When they suck, they can say they didn't really try.

I feel like I've seen that picture of the Turkish shooter over 200 times in the last week while I look for a new job on LinkedIn.

Would you prefer that regular LinkedIn content appear instead of the Turkish shooter?

I have suddenly gained a new appreciation of the wave of spam of the Turkish Olympian.

Off-topic: I really hate those linkedin influencers telling me what a "senior software engineer" is or is not, or how I should use TDD or not use TDD. I keep removing them from my feed, but there's an endless stream of them.

You’re fighting a losing battle. LinkedIn ‘s feed is about as useless as Facebook or twitter’s… because they basically copied it whole cloth. All it is is an algorithmic shot at engagement so they can get paid for ad impressions. The aim is not to keep you up to date with what your contacts are up to.

Seriously, who is putting effort into this?!

Sssh. Thanks to their sacrifice, we can all pretend LinkedIn is a social network and visit it when we are not actively job hunting.

There was a period a few years back where LinkedIn was the easiest place on the internet to get organic reach. As such, the marketing guru set were all recommending LinkedIn as the best place to “build an audience”. I haven’t checked, but I’d guess the juice has been mostly squeezed out by now.

I don't even know what kind of "audience" people are trying to build? Who even reads, let alone cares about these generic business grindhustle posts? And what is the "audience builder" getting out of any of this? I mean, if you read this, are you really going to offer the writer a job?

Crush It with These 5 GAME-CHANGING Strategies!

Hey #LinkedInFam! Ready to LEVEL UP? Here’s how:

Hustle Harder: Rise and grind at 4 AM—no excuses, just results!

Network Like Crazy: Your connections are your gold. Build them everywhere!

Disrupt the Norm: Obliterate the status quo and challenge every rule!

Own Your Brand: Develop a killer personal brand and make everyone know your name!

Keep Learning: Invest in yourself—read, attend, and evolve. Knowledge is power!

Push boundaries and share this with someone who needs a boost! #Hustle #Success #PersonalBrand #Disrupt

I think it's the same thing that makes people take on "support" roles on message forums for tech products (Microsoft, etc.). They're worse than bots, and I don't know what motivates them, but you will always find them.

+1 Furthermore, the posts are extremely unfunny, I wouldn't mind them if they were at least somewhat interesting.

Oh I love the mental gymnastics that some of these posters accomplish to try and fit a lesson they wanna teach to the picture, and somehow attach themselves to that person's notoriety.

I saw it on Reddit making fun of one of those LinkedIn corporate culture posts.

/r/linkedinlunatics is one of the few subreddits I regularly browse and makes me feel a bit less crazy.

If they're allowing this gear, why not allow all competitors to use glasses to get 20/15 vision? It doesn't make sense that "shooters are only allowed to use prescription lenses if they are part of their regular eyewear", given that optometrists tend to slightly overprescribe anyhow, which means there's no uniformity.

why allow runners to wear shoes? https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/363e2578a2107bd2...

Because when shooting, you focus your vision on a pistol iron sights, so you need to see perfectly sharp on a distance less than 1m. Not sure if you can “cheat” with glasses to have better vision on that distance, if your vision is healthy

You must still be looking where you want to shoot otherwise you could point in any direction since "you're just looking at the iron sights". By that logic I could make any distance shot even if I couldn't see anything past 1m.

You look at the target, but without focusing your vision on it - it is locked to the iron sights. So the target, which is black bulls eye, is always blurry when shooting. Increasing depth of field as described in the article, would be beneficial. No idea if prescription glasses would help for someone with no vision issues.

Before you start shooting, you perform a few practice lifts of you arm. One way is to close your eyes, raise your arm and then see where you are aiming. Adjust the position of your back foot if you're off the bulls eye. Key is to keep your wrist locked in position.

Once you raise your arm for real, you don't really need to look at the target, your hand and hence pistol will be in the right spot.

All you need then is to fine-adjust the sight alignment, hence why you focus entirely on the front sight post.

Once you get good you just know how to stand and such, so you'll be mostly bang on right away.

For this reason, if you get glasses for shooting, you'll want them made so your best focus is at the front sight.

A common practice between optometrists is to always _under_prescribe.

Can you provide evidence to this? Every new prescription I have gotten for glasses through my entire life has been too strong and required my eyes to basically degrade to be correct. Avoiding getting new prescriptions too often is pretty much the only reason my eyes are okay.

An optometrist cannot see through your eyes, so they use that lens comparing machine and ask you "which is better", and that leaves plenty of room for the patient to bias the results towards "different from normal is 'Better'", such that they vastly bias their new prescription upwards. Even if every optometrist is thinking about that and purposely downgrading the results of that flow, that could still provide room for the ratchet effect of eye prescriptions that many people with glasses have experienced.

> Can you provide evidence to this?

Wearing glasses for 40 years and talking to ophthalmologists and optometrists.

Also I don't know where you are getting your glasses from, but where I am it's been decades now that the measuring of eyesight (with a machine) is done before the lens fitting, which mainly focuses on astigmatism.

Can I ask why?

Not an optometrist myself, so please excuse if I'm using all the wrong words here. The way it's been explained to me: you want to leave some challenge for the eye to overcome, so the muscles that do the focussing stay in training. If you overadapt, those muscles have less to do and could atrophy slightly, leading to ever more loss of eyesight.

Sounds plausible, at least!

> given that optometrists tend to slightly overprescribe anyhow

I've been wearing glasses for myopia since I was ~10 years old and this is exactly opposite of my experience. Optometrists almost always prescribe the number slightly lower than they determine using tests.

When my number was constantly increasing, I remember ordering the next available increment just because the prescribed number was slightly annoying when looking at far away objects.

Now my number has been stable for a decade and I still sometimes get annoyed when using glasses at the prescribed power.

There's a great video that asks and answers a lot of these questions. For instance, I didn't know you can use replacement legs in professional athletics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfIWxFIVP_Y

or allow cyclists to use motors! these "mechanical irises" seem like doping to me...

Interestingly from the article: “it's worth noting that Oh Ye-jin, the South Korean competitor who took Gold in the 10 Meter Air Pistol event this year, eschews the irises.”

I actually asked my opthalmologist if he could make my vision better than 20/20. He said no, but maybe with contacts.

For baseball hitting, that would be a colossal advantage.

I got my glasses a year ago and just did a checkup. Apparently my current vision (with glasses) sits at 21/20. They did two tests using the rotating lens machine.

I might have better vision (with glasses) than a lot of people who wouldn't get glasses because their vision would be good enough.

I'm in Germany and my glasses are mainly used to correct my astigmatism.

> If you're wondering why competitors don't just rely on prescription glasses, it's because your eyesight can actually change over the course of the day.

Sounds like this article was written by someone who doesn't know basic optics. You cannot replicate the action of an iris with a choice of lens, no matter how stable your vision is. Lens (to first order) adjust the plane of focus, while irises control the depth of field.

Oof. Has nothing to do with the iris. The actual shape of your eye can change throughout the day depending on what you're doing. Your eyeball is just a fluid filled sac.

If you use the iris to widen depth of field, the lens error doesn't matter as much. The limit is the pinhole camera which has no lens at all.

Yes I am well aware of the basic optics, but the author is not. These headsets come with adjustable lens as well as adjustable irises; if your eye curvature was drifting a bit you’d correct with that. (And if it’s drifting a ton, increasing the depth of field is a poor fix indoors.) The dominant reason to have the iris while shooting is to help you keep three points at different distances in simultaneous focus: the target, far sight, and near sight.

Depth of field can be zero. The target is on a plane.

No it can't, because the shooter is aligning the target with the near sight and the far sight. (I believe they typically focus on the far sight, but the issue arises regardless.)

Also a very interesting explanation of all the quirks of this sport by someone who has competed in it:

https://youtu.be/zfaK4Hz0Na8

It actually made me appreciate how impressive and serious this discipline is, despite all the funky-looking gear.

This seems to skip over why this might be useful. I don't know either, but seeing how it literally is just an adjustable iris I'll make a wild guess and assume this is about depth of field. With the "external" iris close enough to the eye it mostly stops being a field stop (=blocking off the field of view) and starts to act like an aperture stop (=influences the aperture aka "f-stop" aka depth of field).

I assume this is the explanation because for accurate shooting you have to bring the two thingies on the gun in line with the target, but the gun is quite close to you and the target is not. Lots of depth of field allows you to reduce the amount of blur you get on either. I'm guessing this is also why their posture is always with the gun extended as far away as possible, the closer the gun is to your face, the blurrier either the gun or the target gets.

If you wear glasses you can test this yourself quite easily, punch a small hole into a piece of paper and take your glasses off. At an arm's length it's obviously a field stop, because you can only see a very narrow solid angle through the hole. If you put it basically on top of your eyelashes, it still reduces the field of view a bit, but you'll also notice how depth of field is increased.

>I'm guessing this is also why their posture is always with the gun extended as far away as possible, the closer the gun is to your face, the blurrier either the gun or the target gets.

That certainly may be part of it, but the primary reason is simpler. Consider a straight line between your eyes and the target, going through the pistol sights. The closer the sights are to your eyes, the bigger the possible "error".

Getting the iron sights further away from you is like turning down your mouse sensitivity, if you want to think of it that way.

> What Are the Olympics Shooting Competitors Wearing on Their Faces?

The cool ones? Nothing.

The best meme I've ran across regarding Yusuf Dikec is this [1]. Nobody should be messing with Yusuf Wick's cat!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8DIU56jF1ev5c6ubG_2IEQ/com...

YouTube hosting screenshots of tweets is a pretty confusing development.

If the guy from Turkey that raw dogged it and achieved silver. I would say these devices are more show than function. Placebo at best.

Depends on your personal eyesight. Mine changes a lot during the day to the point that I noticeably struggle to focus at times.

Someone not needing a wheelchair doesn't make wheelchairs a placebo for people who use it to cope with with an occasionally occurring condition.

I still can't get over the newer meaning of that phrase. Particularly jarring to read it on HN too!

Considering that South Korea has won 32 of the 40 golds ever for this competition, I think they know what they're doing

Man, hacker news comments can be so reddit quality with how dismissive and gut instinct they are... i came here to avoid that

i especially dislike the logic too. if he got silver then maybe he would have actually won if he used the same gear? ignoring the fact that he only got silver as the team event and got 13th individually

Welcome to life :)

Weird argument, in my opinion. It may be that eyesight is only one of several factors that determine performance in shooting events, and these devices help the athletes that use them but provide less benefit to others. Stating it's placebo just because other athletes don't use them is, to me, akin to saying that tape or compression sleeves don't work since some athletes don't use those.

He actually came in 13th, individually. His silver came from a team event.

So he actually got silver?

I've been less interested in the "what" than the "why", as they seem wholly contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.

According to a video posted in this thread; it is to give people with less eye dominance a chance. High eye dominance you can see fhe sight without it fine. I think the focus of the sport is not on how specific your eyes are as you cannot train them like you can muscles

nothing if you are turkish

He wears glasses though.

Batou eyes. Badass.

I wonder why hunters don't wear this gear?

A lot of athletes at the very top level use things that provide, at most, a microscopic edge - because a microscopic edge can be quite significant with people that close to their genetic potential, competing against comparable others. Take something like the buoyant body suits in swimming, which do genuinely provide enough of an advantage to have been banned. If a regular person wears one of those, it's not going to suddenly turn you into Michael Phelps. In all reality you would probably notice 0 difference in feel or results, but if you're doing laps with a delta time measured in the milliseconds, then yeah it can really make a difference. But for regular people engaged in regular sport, these differences don't matter and are not even generally observable.

If anybody likes bowling there's an example there at basically every bowling alley where a guy shows up kitted out in hundreds of dollars of top brand professional gear, custom ball(s), and everything - and bowls a 120.

Hunting typically has less precision requirements, relative to bullseye shooting. Bullseye shooting can get pretty extreme in the level of precision required.

A bullseye rifle competitor at 200 yards lying down is generally unhappy with a shot that is more than 1.5" away from the centerpoint.

A deer's vital area is like over 5" from centerpoint. Even varmint hunters have bigger targets.

I don't hunt, but I compete at bullseye and practice at a range with a lot of hunters, and we routinely get into discussions of how what I need to be good at (precision stuff) has like literally nothing to do with what they need to be good at (mostly, finding the critters, and not spooking them).

Hunters use optics and those give you a parallax-adjusted reticle at infinity / the target distance, so there are no focus problems.

I feel that they have too much extra gear

Have you participated in this sport, or one closely related to it in order to form a basis for such an opinion?

I do shooting competitions from time to time, and I agree that Olympic target shooting has too much strange equipment. Most great shooters don't even bother with it because it's so boring and equipment-specific. Instead they do stuff like USPSA, IPSC, and IDPA. All of those competitions depend more on movement and speed, not slow fire accuracy and special equipment. (Though USPSA does tend to have ridiculous looking guns in its unlimited division.)

With any of the practical shooting competitions, a skilled shooter can be competitive with an unmodified handgun. Also, the skills required have a lot of overlap with real world defensive handgun use. Oh, and it's way more fun.

I did smallbore 3-position (Olympic-style rifle) in high school, and I've shot a handful of USPSA/IPSC matches. I think they're both fun to do, but only the latter is fun to watch. IPSC would be a better Olympic sport than the current precision shooting sports.

I've been pretty deep into competitive fencing (B rating?), which is a pretty gear heavy sport (but mostly around the whole "not dying / going blind" angle). I also have a master classification in bullseye rifle.

Rifle competition has a staggering amount of kit. It's bonkers. Special jacket, pants, underclothes, shoes, blinders, gloves, slings, a rifle that is like a space gun with adjustable weights and pieces all over. Most serious 30 rifle competitors will have three separate stocks to reconfigure the rifle on the fly between positions. Special kneel rolls, special mats, $1000 training cameras. You have this special tripod for holding the rifle between shots, and all your pellets (or cartridges if it's smallbore or high power). If you're not shooting electronic targets, you have a whole separate tripod and sighting scope to see shots & scores.

When I go to the range I'm lugging no joke like 50 pounds of crap.

Bullseye pistol... actually not that much. Special eyewear if your eyes need it. Earplugs. And that's kinda it.

Olympic rifle is some insane gear race bullshit.

But then again, so is internationally competitive bicycle racing. Anything that doesn't have literal $$ caps on gear will end up that way.

Yep. That's why I think it would be better to do it with less equipment.

I'm probably wrong, but I would like to see humans competing not cyborgs.

The only specialized equipment I'm seeing in Olympic pistol shooting is a very fancy pistol, and shooting glasses which may optionally have a blinder and an aperture. Since people are winning Olympic medals with and without specialty glasses, I think it's fair to conclude they're optional.

Well it's pretty clear to me. Silicon Valley and Optometry companies haven't been producing enough cyberpunk paraphernalia and the only ones open to the future are the sharpshooters.

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