Skeet, Trap Shooting

Trap shooting is one of the three major forms of competitive clay pigeon shooting (shotgun shooting at clay target). The others are Skeet shooting and sporting clays). more...

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There are many versions including Olympic Trap, Double Trap (which is also an Olympic event), Down-The-Line, and Nordic Trap. American Trap is most popular in the United States and Canada, primarily as sanctioned by the Amateur Trapshooting Association.

The sport is in some ways a replacement for a game where the targets were live pigeons. Indeed, one of the names for the clay targets used in shooting games is clay pigeons. The layout of modern trap shooting is different from skeet shooting in that there is only one house that releases targets and the shooters only move through 5 different positions.

Trap shooting has been a sport since at least 1793 when it used real birds, usually the then-extremely abundant Passenger Pigeon. Fake birds were introduced around the time of the American Civil War as the Passenger Pigeon was nearing extinction and sufficient numbers were not reliably available. Clay targets were introduced in the 1880's.

International versions

Olympic Trap

Olympic Trap is one of the ISSF shooting events, introduced to the Olympic program in 1900; the current version was introduced in 1950. In International competitions the course of fire is 125 shots for men and 75 shots for women. There is also a 25-shot final for the top six competitors. The ISSF website is www.issf-shooting.org for more information. B.J. McDaniels has written a series of three articles covering upgrading from American ATA/PITA trap shooting—described in the following section—to Olympic trap (on going from checkers to chess, if you will). They may be found in the shotgun coaches' corner of www.USAShooting.com. Several photos of a bunker facility are shown. Olympic trap is also referred to as International trap or Bunker trap.

Examination of those photos will reveal that the Olympic trench contains 15 fixed-angle machines as opposed to the single oscillating machine used in the American games. The additional machines resolve the fairness issue: as the single machine in the American game is constantly oscillating horizontally, every shooter will receive a different mix of target angle difficulty. For example, on any given station, a shooter can plausibly get all (easier) straight-away targets or all extreme angle (more difficult)targets, thus varying his level of difficulty (fairness) considerably in each round shot compared to what his competitor might receive. What target angle the shooter actually gets is a luck of the draw depending on where the constantly-moving machine was pointing at the time he called for his target. The 15 machine fixed-angle format eliminates this luck of the draw problem, ensuring that all shooters will receive exactly the same targets as all other shooters, hence providing the equal difficulty for all. A computer is used to ensure this occurs with programming to deliver 10 left, 10 right and 5 straight-away targets to each competitor in a randomized sequence. Finally, a microphone release system provides equality in target release times. An Olympic trap facility is designed to provide unequivocally equal opportunity for all.

Read more at Wikipedia.org