VI Shooting Guide

Rules and classification

What shooting Para sport is

A beginner's explainer: which disciplines shooting Para sport includes, the distances it is contested over, how scoring works, and which body publishes the rules.

Guide by VI Shooting Guide Editorial Team · Published 2026-10-31

Shooting Para sport is the Paralympic branch of target shooting. It is easy to describe badly: people either picture a hunting culture that has nothing to do with it, or assume it is a demonstration sport with no rules. Neither is true. It has run at every Paralympic Games since 1976, it uses the technical framework of able-bodied target shooting, and it publishes its own rule book.

This page is the ground floor. The next pages in the series take each part apart.

The disciplines and the distances

World Shooting Para Sport, the body that manages the sport under the International Paralympic Committee, lists four disciplines: rifle, pistol, shotgun and vision impaired shooting. Competitions run at three distances — 10m, 25m and 50m — and athletes compete in men’s, women’s and mixed events.

The headcount of events changes between Games. For the Paralympic programme the federation counts 13 shooting events, of which seven are open to both women and men, three are for women only and three for men only. That total is not a permanent figure; it is the split in the current cycle, and it has moved before.

How a score is built

The target has ten concentric scoring rings worth 1 to 10 points, with the centre ring giving 10. In many events each ring is subdivided into ten further zones, which produces a decimal score where 10.9 is the exact centre and the highest score available for a single shot. The federation’s own illustration of the required precision: in air rifle events the bullseye is 0.05cm wide, roughly the size of a printed full stop.

Qualification scores accumulate into a total. The top eight athletes in qualification reach the final, but the qualification score is not carried over — every finalist starts from zero. During the final, the athlete with the lowest score is eliminated until two remain to contest gold and silver. If you only remember one rule from this page, remember that one: it is the rule that most often surprises first-time viewers, who assume the best qualifier has a head start.

The number of shots, the time limit and the target itself all depend on the firearm, the distance and the shooting position. There is no single “standard round” that applies to the whole sport.

Who sets the rules

The sport follows the rules of the International Shooting Sport Federation in combination with World Shooting Para Sport’s own technical rules and regulations, which adapt the ISSF framework for Para athletes. The federation publishes those documents, plus appendices, forms and a separate technical specification for vision impaired shooting, on its rules page.

One governance change is worth knowing about if you are reading documents by date. In April 2026 the IPC and the ISSF signed an agreement to transfer the governance and operation of shooting Para sport from the IPC to the ISSF. That transfer takes effect only after ratification by ISSF member federations at an ISSF General Assembly scheduled for late 2026. Until that ratification happens, the IPC-side documents remain the operative ones, and after it the responsible body changes. Check the date on any rule book before you rely on it.

What this page deliberately leaves out

It does not tell you which class an athlete belongs to, how to join a club, or what equipment to use. Classification is its own page, because the class system is where most misunderstanding starts. Clubs and starting out are also separate, because the useful answer depends on your country.

Sources