Olympic Shooter Kim Rhode Takes On The Critics

"When you think of the Olympics, you think of the medal table, right?" asks Kevin Helliker of the Wall Street Journal. "You wake up every morning and say, 'Let's see where we stand today?'"

Helliker thinks about the Olympics a lot, and he recently found himself wondering why one group of medal-winning athletes almost never gets attention.

"Over the course of the modern games, shooting has been the third largest contributor of gold medals to the United States Olympic Committee," Helliker says. "So this ought to be a sport that we know everything about."

And it's not, but that hasn’t always been the case.

"Shooting used to be one of the top sports in America," he says. "So, there was a time when this was extremely popular."

Compare that to 2012, when the US Shooting team arrived in London for Olympic competition a few days after 12 people were killed and 70 injured in a mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater.

"So the timing in London just could not have been worse," Helliker says.

Kimberly Rhode was at those London Olympics. And, she's one of the most successful American Olympians in any sport. But until Kevin Helliker's piece last week, we had never heard of her.

"Most definitely, there is a stigma attached to my sport," Rhode says. "You look at the London Games, I had just won an Olympic medal and I was walking off and doing a media event, and the first question I got asked was, 'Can you comment on Aurora?'"

Kim Rhode shares her story, In Her Own Words. To hear the full story, click the play button below the headline at the top of the page.