Watchingallsports.com

Marksmanship is the act of firing a projectile with extreme precision and accuracy, often across a large distance. Typically, marksmen are judged not only on their ability to hit a target, but their consistency across multiple shots and under various environmental factors such as a crossbreeze.

History
Archery was featured at a few Summer Games in the early years of the modern Olympics, but was discontinued until 1972. Since then, it has been present at every event. The history of Olympic shooting is just as long, but more consistent: it has only missed two Games.

Archery
The format of Olympic archery has changed several times since its inception. The sport originally featured a handful of different events, before being split into three mens and three womens events. When archery returned to the Games in 1972, the format was a double FITA Round competition with only mens and womens individual events. Since then, the format has changed to an Olympic Round head-to-head format for men and women, which is what the Games use today.

In archery, a round simply refers to a round of competition; rather than have each archer compete for medals with a single shot grouping, each round gives the archer a specific number of arrows to shoot, which earns him points based on his accuracy. The lowest-scoring archers are dropped after each round. The number and configuration of the arrows shot may also change: three sets of six arrows or five sets of three arrows, for instance.

Notably, only recurve bows are allowed at the Olympics.

Shooting
The sport of using a gun to shoot stationary or moving targets. One early Olympic Games used live pigeons as targets, but these were replaced with clay pigeons at the next Games. Although the sport began quite narrow, it has seen considerable expansion in the years since, even brushing up against the 17-event limit a couple times. Shooting was also an open sport for much of its Olympic presence, but now men and women are divided into separate categories.

Contemporary Olympic shooting has the following categories:
– Air pistol
– Air rifle
– Rapid fire pistol
– Rifle three positions (kneeling, prone, standing)
– Skeet (125 clay pigeons in the main event, additional 50 in the finals; shooter must call “pull!” before targets are launched; gun may only be aimed after the targets are launched)
– Trap (same number of pigeons as skeet, target launching is automated, gun may be aimed pre-emptively)