Published on 02 Jul 2024

Shooting Sport at the Olympics: 1976 Montreal Games sees nurse and mother Murdock become first woman to win Olympic shooting sport medal

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Shooting sport was one of the nine events at the first modern Olympics at Athens in 1896, and has featured in every subsequent summer Games save for the 1904 and 1928 editions. Women began competing at the 1968 Mexico Games. Men’s and women’s events were separated from 1984 onwards in rifle and pistol, for double trap from 1996 and for trap and skeet from 2000. The sport will make its 28th Olympic appearance at this summer’s Paris 2024 Games. A month away from the start of competition on July 27 the ISSF website starts its look at past highlights…

Margaret Murdock of the United States became the first woman to win an Olympic shooting medal when she took 50m rifle 3 positions silver at the 1976 Montreal Games.

In an era when women had no separate shooting events Murdock, a 33-year-old nurse from Topeka, Kansas, had won her first titles at the 1967 Pan American Games under her maiden name of Margaret Thompson, earning two golds in smallbore rifle shooting.

That year she set a world record of 391 in the smallbore kneeling event, making her the first woman in any sport to hold an internationally recognised world record above a men’s mark.

At the 1970 World Championships, while four months pregnant, Murdock won several golds including the 300m rifle free standing.

By the time she got to Montreal she had added further titles at the Pan American Games and Championships of the Americas.

In the Olympic final she finished tied in the lead on 1162 points with her team-mate Lanny Bassham, a soldier from Fort Worth. But gold was awarded to the latter as he had scored three 100s to Murdock’s two.

Bassham, who had won Olympic silver four years earlier behind the world record of 1166 set by his US team-mate John Writer, felt the countback decision was unjust and asked, without success, for two gold medals to be awarded.

During the medal ceremony he pulled Murdock to the top of the podium, from where both heard their national anthem.

As David Wallechinsky points out in his Complete Book of the Olympics, Murdock had earned the second US place in the Montreal event through the same countback system after she and Writer had finished level at the US trials.

Murdock graduated from the Washburn University School of Nursing in 1977 and later became a nurse anaesthetist.