How does an accomplished, top-ranked sports shooter, let’s say a gold medal winner at the Olympics, compare to a first-rate military sniper, for instance the late Chris Kyle, in terms of pure shooting prowess?
I’m aware of the fact that a military sniper, on top of being an excellent marksman, has to excel in all sorts of soldiering skills, but I’m interested in the purely technical aspect of high precision shooting.
If you read Chris Kyle’s biography, he covers this.
The short answer is, the sniper is nothing close to the sports shooter. Chris Kyle made his shots using the following technique :
He would get the range to the target with a laser rangefinder, often wielded by his spotter. He had a card taped to the buttstock of the rifle that correlates ranges with scope settings. He would click the scope to the correct range. He would never set the scope for wind - he doesn’t like how the wind changes all the time. He would aim and compensate for the wind by guessing, aim for center mass and fire. He usually had a bolt action, and would make followup shots as needed. Unlike the Olympics, you can fire until you run out of ammo in combat, and Kyle had a way to shove rounds into his rifle quickly - he had some kind of wrist holder he invented for this.
That technique is nothing like what a sports shooter does. Kyle didn’t have all that special setup gear, or that fine tuned rifle made for accuracy at all costs (he did use Accuracy International gear but rugged military versions of it), or the perfect spot - it was whatever abandoned building he could find a place to set up in. In his book he describes raiding houses to find a mattress or table or something to set up on. Hardly the same as Olympic quality gear.
Also, the dry, dusty heat of Iraq meant there was a lot of airborne dust, he would have been sweltering all day, the wind between the buildings would have created all kinds of unpredictable nudges on his shots, etc. No way to get the kind of Olympic accuracy under those conditions, even if you had the shooting skills. And being hot and tired and stressed after months of combat isn’t the same as getting a good meal, a good nights sleep, and a shag in the Olympic village before your turn to shoot.
You can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison since the equipment used has significant differences. Olympic rifle shooting uses either air rifles or .22 LR, which is one of the weakest cartridges commercially available, in order to minimize recoil. The rifles are also extremely heavy despite the light cartridge used, men’s .22 rifles can be up to 17.6 lbs according to the wiki page for the prone rifle event: ISSF 50 meter rifle prone - Wikipedia
In contrast, snipers, particularly US snipers, use 7.62x51 NATO and up for precision shots. They also train to do so at longer ranges, under far more variable conditions, and with a rifle that is lighter for the cartridge by huge margins.
However, there are other competitions that are a lot closer in terms of equipment, and I’m fairly sure that at least a few have retired, and possibly also active duty snipers participating. I’ll try and find more info on those and if I can I’ll post it.
But flip that around: if you’d put him in the Olympic village, given him a good night’s sleep and a good meal, and on a mild and dust-free day handed him a fine-tuned rifle that matched every other would-be medalist’s, how would he have done?
If you want to see civilian* and military marksmanship in competition, you want to go to one of the annual Camp Perry National Matches. They have competitions in both small bore and large bore. Both the US Army and the US Marine Corps field teams to that.
*including but not limited to Law Enforcement shooters.
If you take a soldier or marine sniper out of the field where he’s been taking LONG shots with a 7.62 NATO rifle that he’s set up for himself and that he’s been shooting for a couple of years, fly him to an Olympic village, let him take a shower, give him a steak dinner with all the trimmings, 12 hours for a nice sleep, and then hand him a finely-tuned .22 cal rifle he’s never touched before and let him shoot against someone who’s been pumping bullets out of an identical rifle for 6 months or so, that military sniper isn’t going to do very well. It’s hardly a fair competition.
Plus, military snipers spend time training to do lots of other things besides shooting, while Olympic-level sports shooter train at nothing but shooting. Of course they’ll be better at one specific thing.
On the other hand, talent will out. The talented sniper may not do well right out of the gate, but he could probably rise to the top of the game given a little time and motivation.
Could we tweak it so the military shooters are competing against Olympic pentathletes? The fencers who spend a lot of time in the pool and train at shooting when they aren’t busy riding around on horseback or running cross-country?
Military shooters do not often win shooting competitions that are open to the public. A soldier might also be a great runner and in great shape, but they don’t often win marathons that are open to the public. See how far down you have to scroll on any of the Camp Perry long range matches to find a military shooter. And that soldier was most likely recruited as a talented civilian shooter to do nothing by shoot on behalf of the Army. The majority of the US Army Marksmanship Unit is made up of soldiers who were recruited specifically to be on that team. They go to basic training and get military occupational specialties as a formality. They will do nothing but shoot as a member of that team while in the Army. Their progression and promotion is based on winning competitions.
Sort of like being in the Army Band, but with more bullets.
Sort of like being in the Army Band, but with less melodious instruments. 
I suspect Olympic-level sports shooters mostly have day jobs. I find it hard to believe that competitive shooting is lucrative enough for anyone to be a full-time professional.
ETA: I just pulled up this guy from the USA National [shooting] Team at random and it turns out his day job is being an Army marksman.
ISTR that there were Olympic marksmen turned snipers in one of the wars in the former Yugoslavia sometime in the 1990s.
There’s some overlap. I’m acquainted with a retired sniper who also competed at a high level in several shooting sports. IIRC he was a member of a civilian team that won the highpower rifle national championship.
Does the Army give them time off to participate in the Olympics? Seems like being randomly unable to participate in the Olympics because of training or war would be a big deal…
The army has a marksmanship unit that participates in competition. I know that Julie Golub who’s now a professional shooter was in that unit.
Biathlon. Skate-ski at VO2 max (heart racing as fast as you can without tanking) with an eight pound rifle on your back, then while the clock is still ticking, get your pulse down enough to shoot. Repeat the ski/shoot (prone and standing) cycle several times times. There are different distances depending on the category of race, ranging up to 20km.
Here’s a pursuit vid.
Here’s a training vid.
But of course your point still stands, for they train full time for biathlon, despite it incorporating two diametrically opposed sports.
Ted Gundy at 86 years old still has the touch,
Here; Shooting USA's Impossible Shots: The Old Sniper - YouTube
Not taking anything away from the skill biathletes have (and can I say just how awesome it was that NBC actually showed biathlon for the Sochi games?!) but the required precision is a bit different between the two.
From this site (http://www.usbiathlon.org/terminology.html), biathletes shoot at either an 11.5 cm target (offhand) or a 4.5 cm target (prone) placed 50m away. The Three-Position Rifle competition in the Olympics also uses a 50 meter target. From the ISSF and U.S. Shooting Rulebook (http://www.usashooting.org/library/Rulebooks/2013_USAS_GTR.pdf), page 194, a 4.5 cm target is wider than the 8-ring on the 3-position target, and a 11.5 cm target is wider than the 4-ring. You aren’t contending, heck you might not even be qualifying, in the Summer Olympics rifle disciplines if you can’t do better than all 8s in the prone, or all 4s offhand.
Of course, besides the not-having-to-biofeedback-pulse rates down from 220 BPM, the 3-Position guys (and gals) also get a few more seconds per shot than a good biathlete will take… The added time would help with wind calls, I’d think, which, if I’m reading this ballistics calculator correctly (JBM’s excellent suite at: JBM - Calculations - Trajectory), can be substantial. Plugging in the Eley Biathlete ammo I think most of them are using, and some WAGs about typical climate during a biathlon, I got a 40mm wind drift at 50m from a 90 degree 10MPH wind. Not a lot of margin when you’re shooting at a 45 mm target; it looks like anything over about 6 MPH of relative wind, and they’ve got to account for it or they’ll miss.
As to the OP, Olympic athletes are just on another level than even other non-Olympic professionals who make their living shooting, when it comes to their particular event. Unless, of course, the athlete is someone who’s done both military work and had Olympic success, like Gary Anderson (Gary Anderson (sport shooter) - Wikipedia) Interestingly, I don’t know if the unit that GaryM mentioned, the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit (http://www.usaac.army.mil/amu/) members ever have worked as snipers or designated marksman within other infantry units either before or after their AMU service. I thought it was a case of getting identified early as having talent, then getting assigned to the AMU, but I don’t know for sure. Then again, guys like Carlos Hathcock went back and forth between things like winning the Wimbledon Cup, serving as a USMC Sniper, and back to marksmanship instrucion again. I do know the AMU helps train snipers within units like the Ranger Regiment, though the linked article (The Army Marksmanship Unit Cross-Trains 3/75 Snipers | SOFREP) makes it sound like that the main benefit to the Rangers was that they got to use the AMU’s ranges.
Sorry about the awkward hyperlinks; my computer is not letting me use the Dope’s insert link tool for some reason.