LONDON — Scantily clad girls with guns. There's no more surefire winner to promote a sport struggling to grab airtime and attention. For a hint on tactics that work, look no further than beach volleyball.
Australian shooter Lauryn Mark recently made headlines by appearing in a bikini toting a gun on the front cover of an Australian magazine Zoo — and says she did it as a way to promote her sport.
And she's not the only one. Beate Gauss, 27, who took part in the 10m air rifle event at the London Olympics, recently appeared topless on the front cover of Playboy in Germany along with other Olympians.
US-born Mark says all publicity is good publicity for shooting, where normally crowds are paltry compared with the packed galleries at the Olympics.
"I understand that doing a photospread like I did for Zoo could probably be seen as controversial but I believe it does help the sport get a good image," said the 32-year-old, who competed in women's skeet.
"I know there are other sports like beach volleyball that until the girls basically started wearing nearly bikinis to perform there wasn't anybody following and then they ended up having a huge following so I guess I used that theory along the process.
"There's a lot of really attractive, intelligent, really good talented shooters and I guess my goal was to try and promote the sport in a little bit of a different light to see if it had any change."
Mark, the wife of Australia shooter Russell Mark, also at the Games, said she was surprised by how much publicity was generated by the photos combined with a ban imposed on the couple sharing a room at the athletes' village.
"We lost that battle," she said. "I think probably a better bet would have been to have to take our guns into the village and just demand where to say.
"I had no idea the combination of those two issues would blow up to the proportion they did."
She said appearing in the magazine had attracted positive comments and she hopes it will boost the profile of shooting.
Baring flesh certainly does not faze governing body the International Shooting Sport Federation, which is relaxed about what competitors do in their spare time.
"We have 390 shooters competing here. It's a wide range of people. All of them have private passions," said ISSF communications manager Marco Dalla Dea.
"They are all sportsmen and women from different countries belonging to different federations and different conditions so they do what they want to do."
Mark, who previously competed for the United States, donated the proceeds from her photoshoot to the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne.
"I guess I wanted to show I wasn't doing it as a publicity stunt personally, that for me it was more about trying to promote the sport and I didn't want to benefit personally."
Mark, who described her 15th-place finish in London as "terrible," wants to use her boost in profile to promote interest in shooting, particularly among young women in Australia.