New member saying hello...
Congratulations to Peter, it's a fantastic achievement and he's a great ambassador for our sport.
We know that the sport of shooting in this country is not viewed in the best light by the media and public, but we mustn't give up trying to change that unless we don't care about future participation and successes like this.
We also know the BBC is not the impartial, unbiased voice of the nation they like to say they are. Although live coverage of the Olympics has been pretty good so far (as it should be with the number of channels/streams they have available), we don't all have the ability or time to watch the live coverage and there will be a large proportion of the population who will rely on the nightly round-up programmes to find out what's been happening each day.
In this respect, the BBC could have done much better. I watched 'Olympics Tonight' last night in the hope I'd see coverage of Peter's win, maybe a bit of the back story and an interview and/or studio discussion, as it's what we've been getting with all the other gold medals we've won so far. But, alas, I was let down as is so often the case with coverage of shooting sports in this country.
To be objective, here are the numbers:
'Olympics Tonight' is an 80 minute programme. Out of that, we got 2.5 minutes of our shooting triumph. That's an insult.
This morning, I watched last night's 7pm Olympics show on iPlayer. That's 3 hours and we did a lot better with a very good interview and some of the final. Just over 9 minutes of coverage. It was still well below the coverage given to the rest of the day's sport, though (15.5 mins of cycling, 13.5 mins of basketball, 13.5 mins of boxing, 15 mins of canoeing). It's not really a fair split, is it? But it's been this way for quite a while.
Maybe, just maybe it's going to change a little after this. Perhaps we'll see UK Sports and other funding increased appropriately. As we know, there won't be any legacy facilities we'll benefit from after Woolwich has been turned back into a field, but wouldn't it be great if some future funding could find it's way into some of the existing facilities we have in this country?
Let's remind ourselves of the funding UK Sport put into the Olympics 2012 effort for a few of the sports we've won medals in so far:
Rowing £27,287,600
Cycling £26,032,000
Athletics £25,148,000
Swimming £25,144,600
Sailing £22,942,700
Canoeing £16,176,700
Gymnastics £10,770,600
Judo £7,498,000
Shooting £2,461,866
There's still a way to go before the end, but it will be interesting to see which sport has returned the best value for the money we've put in (and this is public money, remember).
Thanks for listening to my opening rant!
TCK