…is messy and unpleasant at the best of times. Oddly enough, the actual sport-related stuff is fairly free of acrimony; the negotiations between Governing Bodies and the Department of Justice are actually really quite professional and stress-free in nature (I’m not saying there aren’t different agendas there, but they readily put their motivations on the table and we do the same and we work out solutions from there); the relations between Governing Bodies and the Olympic Council and the Sports Council are likewise at least cordial (well, normally anyway); in fact just about all of the relations between anyone else and the sport itself are usually fine.
Within the sport, it’s a whole other ballgame. When you have a group of minority sports, all of which are seen as exceptionally similar by the general population and which have a long history of being ignored and under-funded and outright oppressed by legislation and policy, you’re going to get internecine stress. When you add in the fact that shooting is a sport that you can do for your entire lifetime, you add in the time that stress needs to produce grudges and personal unpleasantness. And when you add in a mixture of the 2% problem (where 2% of the people do 98% of the work); a degree of isolation between the sports themselves; normal human ego; and the particular brand of obsessive honesty that our sport selects for (the hole is in the paper, that’s your score, nowhere to hide from it, no human judge to blame, it’s all on your head)…. well, you get strife and there’s really no other word for it.
It can be childish. It can be petty. And it sucks down time and effort and enthusiasm without ever being sated. And it even winds up in the High Court in some cases. And so I don’t want it in here and we don’t want it in the Hunting or Target Shooting or For Sale/Wanted forums on boards.ie or on the official websites of the Governing Bodies, but some of the things that happen are so… damaging, that they need to be recorded somewhere for posterity.
Hence a new blog:
I don’t know if it’ll do much good. I don’t know who or how it’ll benefit for sure, apart from acting as catharsis for my own peace of mind. I don’t know how long I’ll leave it up there. I don’t know how it’ll go at all, but call it an experiment and let’s see how it runs. We may even get in co-authors or guest authors. Who knows?
At any rate, that’s the last political entry I want to make in this blog. This one’s for sport dammit…
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