Top picture is silver medalist Thomas Paine from the 1896 Summer games, the first year with a shooting competition. Bottom is gold medalist Vitalina Batsarashkina from the 2020 games.
https://www.ssusa.org/content/athens-1896-olympics-the-first-shots-for-record/
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I’d say this is a good example of letting materials science go overboard and destroy the spirit of the sport.
Today, they use the most precise guns that are available with current tech.
Back then, they did the same.
Could also argue the more precise the machine the better it tests the coordination of the human
You could also argue that reducing the need to dynamically compensate for the variance of a more traditional firearm is a key part of the coordination.
You could indeed. Practical shooting competitions are more interesting.
This is just a very specific tangent. It is obviously different than the baseline shooting experience. It would be difficult to mistake this kind of target shooting for anything resembling practical shooting. That’s alright. It can exist as its own thing.