Goddamn! Ethilrist you own me a new keyboard! 
Actually, the equestrian events evolved out of cavalry drill.
The only way I think it would be fair to keep equestrian events in th eOlympics is if they gave the medals to the horse.
After all they are ones doing all the work.
I have no problem with shooting events.
They do give a medal to the horse. Horse and rider are a team.
America just needs to make a summer version of it where skis are replaced by mountain bikes.
Boring? I watched the women’s air rifle finals the other day and it was one of the most interesting things I’ve seen so far (and I mean that in a good way; I’m a fan of most Olympic events). It may have been more interesting for me since I used to shoot competitively as a teen and have a decent idea of the challenge involved.
Well, there’s already the modern pentathlon where
Maybe the X Games should have a hypermodern triathlon with mountain bikes, paintball, and skateboards…
I think you’re giving too much credit to the horse. It takes a lot of work to make them do what the rider wants.
Actually, the horse is considered “equipment”.
Shooting has been in the Modern Olympics since 1896. For one Olympics (1900) they even shot at a live doves
Really?
From the, er, horse’s mouth:
The related Equestrian Equipment page lists rider’s clothing and horse’s equipment. It says nothing at all about the horse being equipment. Besides, when is your equipment considered to be part of your team?
Actualy, biathlon one of the few “realistic” sports in that a modern soldier finds it useful (as opposed to antiquated weapons like javelins and whatnot). Shooting accurately after cross-country skiing is a pretty important ability and I understand the Scandinavian countries (among other places) routinely include it in military training, just in case.
It’s no more “creepy” than any lethal skill taught to modern soldiers. It might be kind of amusing to see a competitive sniping event in the future: drop a representative from each of 15 nations in the woods at night with computerized laser scopes that can record a “kill”, then see who’s still “alive” in the morning.
And it reminds me of one of my favourite Aislin cartoons, drawn during the 1976 Montreal Olympics. A soldier in full combat dress and gas mask (the '76 Olympics had major military security, in light of what had happened in Munich four years earlier) is standing on the podium, using a walkie-talkie: “Terribly sorry, sir, but in the process of escorting the marathon, I seem to have won the bronze!”
It’s a big part of infantry training in Norway, and of various exercises held by NATO or individual NATO members in Norway in the winter. Not too long ago I saw a video clip of some British soldiers undergoing winter survival training in, I think, Dovre. Forgive me, but I was chuckling: they were walking as though someone had suddenly fastened six-foot long snowshoes to their feet :eek:
I love watching biathlon. For one thing, everything really is up in the air until they’re finished with the last shooting: a great skier can just have a lousy day with the rifle, and end up with so many penalty laps or time penalties that he finishes around twenty-fifth place. It’s also amazing to think they can hit those targets with their hearts and lungs racing from all the skiing, plus the fact that this is winter and the weather can really suck - poor visibility and/or high winds are pretty common. Of course, the targets are easier to hit than in the straight shooting events, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy!
Or 4-wheelers. Oh, wait, we’ve got that. It’s called “deer season.”
Well there’s the Summer Biathlon, where the athletes run five or ten km and shoot at intervals.
There’s a story on the local news about the Small Bore Rifle competition. “We usually don’t cover this event, but it happens that the entire U.S. Small Bore Rifle Team is from Western Washington.”
I haven’t noticed Biathlon or other shooting events covered well (or at all) in about 20 years or so. I’ve been told that shooting events (especially Biathlon) are very popular outside of the U.S. So a question: Are the shooting events “unpopular” in the U.S. because people find them dull? Or do people just not know about them because the Networks choose not to cover them? Why don’t the Networks cover them? I know NBC, 20 years ago, seemed very “anti-gun” to me at the time.
Bingo! We have a winner!
Og Forbid the network wanks ever show firearms in a good light. :rolleyes:
A few years back, there was a show on TV over here about Olympic competition (sorry, I can’t remember the name or the network.) When they came to shooting, they mentioned that riflemen at the Olympic level have learned to fire between heartbeats, then they put a laser sight on a shooter’s rifle to demonstrate why. As fit as this person had to have been, the dot travelled half the diameter of the target with each heartbeat.
This is just my opinion, but I’d say that being able to shoot more accurately than the body’s ability to hold still is a pretty darned impressive talent to have and develop. By what criteria could the competition not be a sport?
I beg your pardon. As any good fan of Zonker Harris knows, the Summer Biathlon is tanning and golf 
I don’t know why winter biathlon isn’t televised in the US, but neither is cross-country skiing. In fact I’ve seen some American coverage of xc skiing saying they go “at a snail’s pace”. Now, I ski at a snail’s pace, but that’s because I stink at it. The skiers in international competition are going a good bit faster than an Alpine skier doing regular slalom… but somehow slalom is considered fast and exciting, while xc is slow and boring. 
The network people might be concerned that showing the shooting part of biathlon might be seen as “condoning violence” or some such nonsense, but really, I think it’s the skiing that’s the real deal-breaker there.
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- The reason that shooting, fencing and archery are included in the Olympics has something to do with the fact that the Olympics started out as contest of military exercises, and to that end–it really bears questioning why we even have such things like figure skating and synchronized diving involved today.
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- The reason that shooting, fencing and archery are included in the Olympics has something to do with the fact that the Olympics started out as contest of military exercises, and to that end–it really bears questioning why we even have such things like figure skating and synchronized diving involved today.
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- The reason that most of the Olympic shooting competitions aren’t televised well in the US isn’t so much to do with anti-gun sentiments as it is that there’s not a lot of interest in these events compared to others, and that even if they could show everything, these events don’t consist of much action. Sporting clays does often get televised because it has some element of visible, constant action to it, but the stationary shooting competitions really don’t. There’s lots of dead air time when nothing is really happening and even when the competitors are actually firing, all the participants look pretty much the same. The only real difference is what they score, and you can effectively cover that in quick scoreboard summaries. To a great extent, the broadcasters conduct studies to see what people are most interested in, and that’s what gets most of the air time. So you see lots of “conventional” sports (like basketball), and lots of prime-air-time spent on things like figure skating, gymnastics and downhill skiing.
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I think it depends on who you ask. My husband is really into target shooting, and wanted to watch the shooting events. Unfortunately for him, by the time he looked up when the events would be shown on TV, they were already over with. Gymnastics and most of the other events (except the swimming) bore him to death.