You can’t quite simulate the experience of Olympic skeet shooting in central London, but Clays has given it a pretty good go. The bar chain, which is known for its simulated clay shooting games, has recently added an Olympic skeet mode to its roster for anyone who wants to experience the fast-paced nature of the sport. So, not knowing what to expect, I headed down to Clays in the City to try it myself.

Olympic skeet shooting follows a specific template: there are eight stations you have to shoot from, arranged in a semicircle between two ‘houses’ where the clays are shot from. One of the houses releases clays from three feet above the ground and the other from 10 feet – to mix up the trajectory of the clays released.

Of course, none of this really exists in the Clays game. Instead, it’s a simulated arena with the Eiffel Tower in the background to tie the whole thing into the Paris 2024 theme (although in real life, the shooting centre for the current Olympics is located just outside a city called Châteauroux, to the south of Paris). You also don’t get the recoil from the bullets being released, which obviously ramps up the difficulty significantly.

“I tried 3 Olympic sports in the run-up to Paris 2024 – this is what happened”