In today's Wall Street Journal, article plus reader comments, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stigmatized-olympians-1460673461?mod=trending_now_3#livefyre-comment.
The Stigmatized Olympians
USA Shooting, which used to be run by the NRA, remains shrouded in controversy—despite winning numerous gold medals at the Games
American Kim Rhode ejecting a spent cartridge during qualifiers for the women's trap event, at the 2012 Summer Olympics. Photo: Getty Images
By Kevin Helliker, The Wall Street Journal
Updated April 14, 2016 7:30 p.m. ET
Kim Rhode is hoping to win an Olympic medal in Rio this summer, as she did at each of the preceding five Summer Games. That would make her the first American ever to win a medal at six different Olympics. Swimmer Michael Phelps has climbed the podium at only three.
If Rhode stands relatively anonymously on the cusp of American Olympic history, that’s because her sport is less popular than swimming, and lots more controversial. She shoots a shotgun. At the London Games, which started days after a mass shooting at a movie theater in Colorado, Rhode and other Team USA shooters received anonymous online death threats, requiring additional security.
“Our sport has an unfortunate stigma attached to it,” says Rhode, a 36-year-old Southern Californian. Following December’s deadly shooting rampage in nearby San Bernardino, the media sought out comment from Rhode, who expressed sorrow for the victims and support for gun rights. Why should that crime have placed her in the spotlight? she asks: “You don’t hear them asking Nascar drivers to comment on crimes involving cars.”
The very thing that makes shooting the most controversial Olympic sport—its use of guns—also provides a strong base of support. When Rhode visits Cabela’s, CAB 0.87 % the outdoors sporting-goods retailer, mobs of fans seek her autograph. Along with Winchester, Beretta and several other firearms-related concerns, Cabela’s sponsors Rhode. “Compared with other sports, we have a massive industry behind us,” says Rhode, a wife and mother who says she’s the “primary breadwinner.”
In a nation vibrant with bird hunters, Rhode stands apart for her accuracy at shooting fast-flying objects. In practice, if she nails only 24 out of 25 so-called clay pigeons, she’s upset with herself. Her Olympic prizes consist of a bronze, a silver and three gold medals. To win a spot in Rio, she must finish first in points after next month’s Olympic shooting trials, which she enters with a significant lead. Another female shotgun shooter, 22-year-old Morgan Craft, already holds a spot in Rio, thanks to her first-place finish at last year’s world championships.
Lones Wigger, who was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, won a gold medal in 50-meter rifle at the 1964 Games in Tokyo. Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS
American gold medalists in shooting are no more anonymous than those in equestrian, canoeing and badminton. But they’re a lot more numerous. Shooters have won more gold medals for the U.S. than has every other type of Summer Olympics athlete except for swimmers and track-and-field members. In the total medal count, shooters rank sixth in the U.S. behind boxing, wrestling, diving, swimming and track and field. In Rio, the sport’s governing body, USA Shooting, hopes to top its performance in London, where it won a bronze and three gold medals.
Compared with the three gold medals that USA Gymnastics won in London, that trio of shooting gold medals produced a feeble bang. In an age of random and deadly firearm sprees in the U.S., many Americans are reluctant to celebrate sporting triumphs achieved with a gun. Many also are blind to the discipline and skill required, as well as the joy that elite marksmanship can stir. On a recent flight, when Robert Mitchell identified himself as executive director of USA Shooting, the woman seated beside him said, “‘So you teach people how to hold up 7-Elevens,’” he recalls, adding that the ensuing conversation left her with a newfound appreciation for the sport.
Ambivalence about Olympic shooters would likely run even deeper if their governing body were still the National Rifle Association, as it was before the founding of USA Shooting in the mid-1990s. The bylaws of USA Shooting prohibit it from taking positions in political debates involving guns, said Mitchell. But the governing body has had to negotiate special allowances with the Transportation Security Administration so that its athletes can fly to competitions with cylinders that otherwise would be prohibited.
Margaret Murdock, a silver medalist at the 1976 Olympics, loading her rifle at the World Shooting Championships in 1970. Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Also, some states have enacted assault-weapon restrictions that encompass a highly specialized 22-caliber Olympics sport pistol, making it impossible for competitors to train, let alone compete, in those states. Nathalia Granados, a former Colombian shooter who last year became an American citizen, now lives with her husband in New York, where she can’t own the pistol she needs to compete in the 25-meter event. Little wonder that she has failed to make the U.S. Olympic team headed to Rio, she says. “If a tennis player doesn’t have their racket, it wouldn’t be the same as training with their racket,” she says.
Despite the success of U.S. shooters, only one has been voted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, whose members are selected by athletes, historians and others. Lones Wigger, a two-time gold medalist rifleman, calls his election to the hall “a token thing. We have several other people who ought to be in consideration. But guns are political.”
“Shooting is controversial in the United States, because of liberals badmouthing it,” says Margaret Murdock, a former military shooter who won an Olympic silver medal competing against men at the 1976 Olympics, eight years before women’s shooting was introduced at the Games.
Outside the hunting, firearms and outdoors industries, sponsors of shooting are hard to come by, says Mitchell, the USA Shooting executive director. Executives of other companies will say, “‘I’ll be glad to cut you a check myself, but my firm, I can’t do that,’” says Mitchell.
Sports agent Patrick Quinn says, “My personal views on guns skewed to the negative” until a friend at Nike Inc. NKE 0.02 % recommended that he represent Rhode. “Working with Kim and seeing what good people shooters are has made me look differently at the whole issue of guns,” says Quinn, a partner at Chicago Sports & Entertainment Partners. The problem, he says, “isn’t necessarily the guns.”
Quinn says it doesn’t bother him that Rhode is a hard sell to companies outside the shooting industry. “It’s a giant industry, and she’s a big fish in that pond,” he says.
The Stigmatized Olympians
USA Shooting, which used to be run by the NRA, remains shrouded in controversy—despite winning numerous gold medals at the Games
American Kim Rhode ejecting a spent cartridge during qualifiers for the women's trap event, at the 2012 Summer Olympics. Photo: Getty Images
By Kevin Helliker, The Wall Street Journal
Updated April 14, 2016 7:30 p.m. ET
Kim Rhode is hoping to win an Olympic medal in Rio this summer, as she did at each of the preceding five Summer Games. That would make her the first American ever to win a medal at six different Olympics. Swimmer Michael Phelps has climbed the podium at only three.
If Rhode stands relatively anonymously on the cusp of American Olympic history, that’s because her sport is less popular than swimming, and lots more controversial. She shoots a shotgun. At the London Games, which started days after a mass shooting at a movie theater in Colorado, Rhode and other Team USA shooters received anonymous online death threats, requiring additional security.
“Our sport has an unfortunate stigma attached to it,” says Rhode, a 36-year-old Southern Californian. Following December’s deadly shooting rampage in nearby San Bernardino, the media sought out comment from Rhode, who expressed sorrow for the victims and support for gun rights. Why should that crime have placed her in the spotlight? she asks: “You don’t hear them asking Nascar drivers to comment on crimes involving cars.”
The very thing that makes shooting the most controversial Olympic sport—its use of guns—also provides a strong base of support. When Rhode visits Cabela’s, CAB 0.87 % the outdoors sporting-goods retailer, mobs of fans seek her autograph. Along with Winchester, Beretta and several other firearms-related concerns, Cabela’s sponsors Rhode. “Compared with other sports, we have a massive industry behind us,” says Rhode, a wife and mother who says she’s the “primary breadwinner.”
In a nation vibrant with bird hunters, Rhode stands apart for her accuracy at shooting fast-flying objects. In practice, if she nails only 24 out of 25 so-called clay pigeons, she’s upset with herself. Her Olympic prizes consist of a bronze, a silver and three gold medals. To win a spot in Rio, she must finish first in points after next month’s Olympic shooting trials, which she enters with a significant lead. Another female shotgun shooter, 22-year-old Morgan Craft, already holds a spot in Rio, thanks to her first-place finish at last year’s world championships.
Lones Wigger, who was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, won a gold medal in 50-meter rifle at the 1964 Games in Tokyo. Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS
American gold medalists in shooting are no more anonymous than those in equestrian, canoeing and badminton. But they’re a lot more numerous. Shooters have won more gold medals for the U.S. than has every other type of Summer Olympics athlete except for swimmers and track-and-field members. In the total medal count, shooters rank sixth in the U.S. behind boxing, wrestling, diving, swimming and track and field. In Rio, the sport’s governing body, USA Shooting, hopes to top its performance in London, where it won a bronze and three gold medals.
Compared with the three gold medals that USA Gymnastics won in London, that trio of shooting gold medals produced a feeble bang. In an age of random and deadly firearm sprees in the U.S., many Americans are reluctant to celebrate sporting triumphs achieved with a gun. Many also are blind to the discipline and skill required, as well as the joy that elite marksmanship can stir. On a recent flight, when Robert Mitchell identified himself as executive director of USA Shooting, the woman seated beside him said, “‘So you teach people how to hold up 7-Elevens,’” he recalls, adding that the ensuing conversation left her with a newfound appreciation for the sport.
Ambivalence about Olympic shooters would likely run even deeper if their governing body were still the National Rifle Association, as it was before the founding of USA Shooting in the mid-1990s. The bylaws of USA Shooting prohibit it from taking positions in political debates involving guns, said Mitchell. But the governing body has had to negotiate special allowances with the Transportation Security Administration so that its athletes can fly to competitions with cylinders that otherwise would be prohibited.
Margaret Murdock, a silver medalist at the 1976 Olympics, loading her rifle at the World Shooting Championships in 1970. Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Also, some states have enacted assault-weapon restrictions that encompass a highly specialized 22-caliber Olympics sport pistol, making it impossible for competitors to train, let alone compete, in those states. Nathalia Granados, a former Colombian shooter who last year became an American citizen, now lives with her husband in New York, where she can’t own the pistol she needs to compete in the 25-meter event. Little wonder that she has failed to make the U.S. Olympic team headed to Rio, she says. “If a tennis player doesn’t have their racket, it wouldn’t be the same as training with their racket,” she says.
Despite the success of U.S. shooters, only one has been voted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, whose members are selected by athletes, historians and others. Lones Wigger, a two-time gold medalist rifleman, calls his election to the hall “a token thing. We have several other people who ought to be in consideration. But guns are political.”
“Shooting is controversial in the United States, because of liberals badmouthing it,” says Margaret Murdock, a former military shooter who won an Olympic silver medal competing against men at the 1976 Olympics, eight years before women’s shooting was introduced at the Games.
Outside the hunting, firearms and outdoors industries, sponsors of shooting are hard to come by, says Mitchell, the USA Shooting executive director. Executives of other companies will say, “‘I’ll be glad to cut you a check myself, but my firm, I can’t do that,’” says Mitchell.
Sports agent Patrick Quinn says, “My personal views on guns skewed to the negative” until a friend at Nike Inc. NKE 0.02 % recommended that he represent Rhode. “Working with Kim and seeing what good people shooters are has made me look differently at the whole issue of guns,” says Quinn, a partner at Chicago Sports & Entertainment Partners. The problem, he says, “isn’t necessarily the guns.”
Quinn says it doesn’t bother him that Rhode is a hard sell to companies outside the shooting industry. “It’s a giant industry, and she’s a big fish in that pond,” he says.
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