British Government scuppers British Shooting for the Olympics

Flip. I mean, you’d think the whole lets-build-a-range-and-then-tear-it-down approach for the 2012 Olympics was a bad idea, and the whole lets-guard-the-public-from-the-shooters-with-pistols was a farcical one, but now, right in the middle of the build-up to the 2012 London Games, they’ve cut the funding for British Shooting by 78% – because they didn’t win medals in Beijing, when Beijing was meant to be experience-building! So they’re going from 48 funded athletes to 5. Five. Flip. I mean, that’s farcical and bad, they’ve thrown away home advantage completely. And not only have they lost their athletes, they’ve lost their Performance Director John Leighton-Dyson as well; so they’ve lost a big chunk of the infrastructure they needed as well. But you can be darn sure, in September, 2012, they’ll be standing up in Parliment, asking questions on why they didn’t win more medals…and why several of those 43 shooters went over to Ireland on the grandfather clause and shot for us instead, taking all that invested UK money and pumping it directly into the Irish shooting community.

Well, their loss…