Meet Olympic medalist and champion Kim Rhode. You won’t hear as much about her in the news and promotions as other Olympic athletes because Rhode is a shotgunner. The media has difficulty differentiating between target sport shooting and criminal gun violence so they much prefer to profile swimmers and gymnasts.
Rhode is competing at the Rio 2016 Olympics for the United States in Olympic skeet. She hails from gun-hating California. In fact, I used to shoot at the same shooting park as she did when I was living in Southern California and that’s about the only thing I have in common with her on the shooting front.
Rhode is one of American’s most accomplished athletes. Here are some things you should know about her and her amazing talent.
1. Rhode won her first gold medal at the Olympics in 1996…in a different shooting sport. Her sport, women’s double trap, was dropped after the 2004 Olympics, so Rhode went in 2008 to shoot Olympic skeet and won a silver medal. Trap and skeet are very different sports, just for your reference.
Here’s Rhode qualifying for the 2008 Beijing Olympics
2. She was 17 years old when she won her first medal.
Watch an overview of Rhode’s career.
2. Rhode is the first American to qualify for the the Olympics on five different continents. She competed in Atlanta ’96 (GOLD), Sydney ’00 (BRONZE), Athens ’04 (GOLD), Beijing ’08 (SILVER), and London ’12 (GOLD).
Kim talks about competing in her sixth Olympics.
3. She’s a vocal proponent of the Second Amendment and a lifetime NRA member.
“At the London Games, the first question I got asked when I just won a gold medal in the Olympics wasn’t, ‘Tell us what it’s like to represent your country or what’s it like standing on the podium or what does this medal mean to you?'” she says. “It was: ‘Can you comment on Aurora?'” — a reference to the mass shooting in a movie theater that left 12 people dead.
“No other sport in the Olympics gets that,” she says. “They don’t ask the swimmers to comment after somebody drowns.”
Here’s Kim addressing the 2012 RNC.
4. She was pregnant in London when she won her gold medal. Her score was 99/100.
Watch Kim talk about preparing for the 2016 Olympics.
5. If Rhode wins a medal at Rio she will be the only American athlete in history to medal at six consecutive Olympics. She would be the third woman in Olympic history to have accomplished such a feat.
Here’s Rhode skeet shooting her way to a gold medal in London 2012.
https://youtu.be/T4i3Wr7KKtA
Rhode will shoot on Friday, August 12, starting at 8 a.m. ET for the qualification. The semi-final begins at 2 p.m. ET and the final at 2:15 p.m. ET. Watch her and all our USA shooting team members during the Olympics.
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