Vision impaired shooting: a short history of a young discipline

Shooting Para sport as a whole has been at every Paralympic Games since 1976. Vision impaired shooting is much younger, and the difference matters: if you read a page that lumps the two together, you will come away with the wrong idea about what exists today.

2015: an international grand prix

The federation records a Vision Impaired Shooting International Grand Prix held 28–30 January 2015 in Stoke Mandeville, Great Britain. It was funded by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, and it ran two events: 10m Air Rifle Standing and 10m Air Rifle Prone, both 60 shots and both mixed.

The federation’s description of the purpose is the important part. The competition was organised as part of an ongoing development project, and was described as an essential part of initiating the project to define a sport-specific classification system. In other words, the 2015 competition was not the finish line — it was how the sport began to work out how athletes would be grouped.

The project behind it

That development project is described in the same place, and it has two explicit workstreams:

1. A sport-specific system of classification, developed by a team of expert vision impairment researchers from Anglia Ruskin University.
2. Standardised practices, rules and technology, developed by the federation’s technical experts and management team.

Both are what you would need before a discipline can be run fairly across countries: a way to group athletes, and one agreed way to measure aim and score it. The technical specification that now defines the hardware is the visible output of the second workstream.

2017: Innsbruck

The federation’s page describes a competition planned for September 2017 in Innsbruck, Austria, as a step in the development. We did not confirm that it took place as planned.

2019: joining World Shooting Para Sport

The federation’s About page says that in 2017 it adopted Para trap and that, two years later, vision impaired shooting joined World Shooting Para Sport, which gives 2019.

Today: a class, a specification, and no Paralympic medal yet

Three facts define the present state, and it is worth holding all three at once.

• A sport class exists. SH-VI is allocated to athletes with a vision impairment for competition in 10m rifle events.
• A technical specification exists. It governs the equipment used in vision impaired competitions, and the federation’s page names two approved suppliers (we could not read the document itself).
• A Paralympic medal does not exist yet. The Paralympic shooting programme is rifle and pistol events (Wikipedia); the federation adopted Para trap in 2017 for Shooting Para sport, which is a separate matter. Vision impaired shooting is not among the shooting events contested at the Games.

That third point is why the federation’s language is careful. The sport is managed within World Shooting Para Sport, has a class, has rules and has competitions; it is not described as a Paralympic event.

Why the history is written this way

Progress in a Para discipline leaves a paper trail: funding decisions, competition dates, the date a class enters the rule book, the version of a technical specification. Those documents are more useful than a narrative, because you can check them and date them.

The federation’s rules page currently publishes technical rules implemented from January 2026, with a VI technical specifications document whose file name carries 01-2026. When a document has a date in its title, treat an older description of the sport as potentially out of date.

Sources

• World Shooting Para Sport, Vision Impaired shooting — the 2015 Stoke Mandeville Grand Prix and its two events, the funding body, the two workstreams and Anglia Ruskin University, the September 2017 Innsbruck competition, and the approved suppliers.
• World Shooting Para Sport, History of Shooting Para Sport — 1976 onward for the sport as a whole, Para trap in 2017, VI shooting joining in 2019, and the current 13-event Paralympic split.
• Shooting at the Summer Paralympics — the Games-by-Games event list, used to confirm which disciplines have been contested.
• World Shooting Para Sport, Rules and Regulations — dates of the current rule book and VI technical specifications.