South Korea sent a fully-kitted out player for the Olympic shooting. Turkey sent an 51 yr old guy with no specialized lenses, eye cover or ear protection and got the silver medal
South Korea’s record-breaking Olympic shooter -Kim Yeji.
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Eyesight is not the issue here - this isn't an eye test. At 10m the target looks like a small circle, there isn't any further detail to see. Air pistols can only have iron sights, so there are three things to look at while shooting: the rear sight, the front sight, and the target. If you're focusing on the right thing (your sights), the target will be slightly out of focus anyway.
So yes, anyone with perfect eyesight can get lenses made, but it doesn't help much. Back when I was shooting, the best guy on my team had like +0.75 in his shooting eye but he didn't bother wearing corrective lens while shooting. That said, I was a teenager so standards were different - maybe you do need perfect eyesight to compete at an Olympics level. But everyone can buy shooting glasses with corrective lens anyway.
The glasses are custom in the sense that nobody wears them outside of shooting because you look like a dork in them, but they can be bought off the shelf - this is the first result I found on Google, there are tons more:
https://buinger.com/Shooting-Glasses
The elephant... I've never seen it before, it's probably light enough that it doesn't work as a counterweight. But you don't need that to judge your own heart rate. When your gun is lifted you can feel your own heartrate.
As for cheating... The real cheating occurs with stuff like heart medication to make your heartbeat slower, and beta blockers to reduce anxiety. A lot of shooting is a mental game. At a high enough level, nearly every shot needs to be a bullseye, so it's about maintaining that consistent standard and not letting the occasional 9/10 shot creep into your head and affect the rest of your shots.
One description I found said that the lens part of her glasses contains an adjustable "iris that can be adjusted to change the perceived depth of field" - which sounds to me like an adjustable aperture in photography. With a smaller aperture (larger f-number in photography) I believe she would potentially be able to have both the sights and the target in focus? Otherwise I'm not sure what the point would be.
Edit; Oh - and the elephant is her daughter's. :-)
As someone else already said, you don't see the target anyway. You focus on your sights, not the target, because unlike stuff like hunting, it's much more important to line up the shot perfectly than keeping track of what you shoot at (the discs tend to not run away). And at 10m, the palm-sized target is just a black circle.
Iirc most people aim below the target on purpose (and adjust the sights) anyway. That stuff confuses the hell out of me when I pick up someone else's gun. Is it set to aim dead center? Is it set to aim just below? Is it set to aim at 4.20 mm to 69° down to compensate for that dude's preference? Who knows!
Yeah - I read the other comments thanks - it would be helpful if you read mine.
So you don't look at the target at all? Like you're only looking at the sights and hope there is a target downrange somewhere? No - right? Because "most people aim below the target" right? And near-sighted people wouldn't need glasses at all if they "didn't look at the target". I don't doubt that the focus is on the sights, but the sights are pointing at something... right?
So what I'm wondering is - what is the point of an adjustable aperture on her lens then? I was speculating that it's because it would keep the tiny distant target in focus while she also lines up the sights. Or maybe it helps keep the near and far posts of the sights in focus at the same time? Human vision can have a pretty narrow depth of field.
And in fact it seems that my speculation may be correct: https://www.pyramydair.com/blog/2008/06/10-meter-pistol-shooting-part-4/
"Because the light is reduced, the shooter’s eye acts like a camera lens and adjusts the depth of field (range of distances at which objects appear in focus) to the maximum. That’s what keeps both the sight picture and the bullseye in sharp focus, but the shooter wants the front sight to be in the sharpest focus, because it’s what he focuses on."
So you get a sharper target while focusing on the very close (by comparison) sight.
Gee, maybe that's why she's wearing those crazy glasses in the picture...
It's already been explained that the glasses cannot have magnification, so what advantage do you think they offer when looking through iron sights?
And also that theyre prescription...
And 20/20 isn't "perfect" vision, it's perfectly average.
So someone can get glasses to improve their vision (especially at a certain distance) to better than 20/20 and have an advantage.
While still not having magnification.
Do you think glasses that help you see further are working via magnification?
The point is that there's nothing further to see beyond a tiny solid black dot.
You really don't see how vision is important in marksmanship?
You really don't see how improving your vision doesn't make the target look bigger to you?
I know what you said intuitively sounds like it makes sense, but I'd encourage you to try a shooting sport in person if you're really interested in the subject.
I'm one generation away from subsistence hunting...
I had "my own" shotgun before I was born...
I know about guns bruh. Having better vision is an advantage in shooting.
It's not rocket appliance
Hunting and precision shooting is different. Not to mention air powered guns are very different from gunpowder based firearms.
Look, I'm not the right person you should be arguing this with - there isn't anything else I can say to convince you, except to say that the international world of shooting has accepted that corrective glasses don't confer an unfair advantage in competition. If you're really interested, find your local gun club, see if they have any air pistol events, try it out, ask the club director about the rules.
Nobody said anything about 20/20 vision.
Improving your vision means being able to differentiate details better. Magnification means that you can make something look bigger.
Having a prescription glasses that adds detail but not magnification means that the small target will still look just as small to you as it would to a person with perfectly healthy vision. How do you think this gives them an advantage over someone with normal vision?