Tabla de contenidos para Issue 152 en Bow International

Well, it’s almost upon us; the most troubled Summer Olympics in all our living history, the first one of what we’ll probably all be calling ‘the COVID era’ someday. It’s happening, but it is possibly the most unpopular Olympics ever held, if the opinion polls of various Japanese newspapers are to be believed. (We’ve explored a few of the issues around holding it towards the back of this issue of your soaraway Bow.) The Olympics remains the biggest thing in the archery world; the bump in awareness boosts interest, numbers and the business of archery all over the world (and that includes compounds). The world of archery needs the shot in the arm every four years that the Games generates, and this year more than ever. In the past few…

For the first time since London 2012, Great Britain will be sending a full complement of six archers to the Olympic Games. These six spots were won on a noisy field in Den Bosch in the Netherlands in 2019, in the primary qualification match prior to the World Championships – a moment of resolve that may well be the most important match of any recurve archer’s career. In the space of about half an hour, the men (by beating hosts Japan 6-0) and the women (by beating Italy 6-2) changed the course of British archery. Following selection in 2021, the athletes going to Tokyo looked almost identical to those who won in Den Bosch: Naomi Folkard, Sarah Bettles, Bryony Pitman, Patrick Huston, James Woodgate and Tom Hall. Watching the almost…

Let's start with the basics; what are psychological skill techniques? A clinical definition is the constant practice of a specific psychological skill that can help enhance performance and achieve greater self-satisfaction within the sport. It is rare to find a simplified definition in the sports psychology world, and simple does not mean easy. If you rewatch, on YouTube, the 2016 Olympic men's gold medal match between Korea's Ku Bonchan and France's Jean-Charles Valladont, you will see Bonchan take aim for the final arrow that sealed his first Olympic gold medal. What most people don't remember was the end before the decisive arrow. The future winner did not look as composed leading into the end, after Valladont had rallied back from two sets down. The pressure began increasing for both archers…

The Olympic Games of antiquity were held every four years from at least 776 BC to AD 393, when these ‘vulgar’ pagan displays were supposedly abolished by the Christian emperor Theodosius I. They encompassed various contests of running, lifting, throwing, jumping, fighting and, in later years, riding, as well as musical and poetic competitions and religious ceremonies. The idea of the sporting contests was to find the perfect athlete, the fastest, strongest, most skilled hero, who excelled in many of these disciplines. Archery was never part of the Games since the ancient Greeks had a distaste for the bow, which could kill a man from afar instead of face to face. The revival of the Olympic Games in modern times is essentially the life’s work of one man, the French…

Readers of Bow with long memories may remember us giving some of these away many moons ago. With the closure of Future’s Midlands office, one last one has popped up, and we were pleased to see it. This is still an excellent, rugged case, semi-rigid with two zipped sections lined with padded foam cut-outs to cushion your gear. You can just about squeeze two recurve set-ups in here too. Mesh panels in the upper section and a pocket on the front offer additional kit space. These retailed for around £100 back in the day, if we recall correctly. Cartel/Midas doesn’t even exist any more – it has long rebranded as Epik Archery. But this case is still good. We hope to have some newer prizes for you very soon, just…

The final Olympic places for Tokyo 2020 were awarded over a three-day qualification session in Paris, prior to the third World Cup event of the season. Fifty nations have qualified, pending full acceptance of places by national Olympic committees. Mexico, the USA and Italy won the last three women’s team Olympic quotas, the first two via shootoffs. France, Indonesia, and the USA took the men's team spots. In the last scramble for individual spots on Monday, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Moldova, Poland, Russia and Ukraine men all won spots, with Israel making an Olympic archery debut. Women's spots were won by Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Mongolia, and Romania. Archers from Bangladesh, Chad, Malawi and the US Virgin Islands were awarded the four universality places for smaller and developing nations in…

Team GB are currently attempting to persuade Tokyo 2020 that it will be safe for them to compete, after reports that Japan was threatening to add Britain to a 'red list' of countries due to an increase in the spread of coronavirus variants. The BOA have said that so far 86 per cent of Britain’s 300-plus Olympic team due to compete in the Japanese capital have received at least one vaccine dose. In a letter sent to the President of Tokyo 2020 Seiko Hashimoto in June, British Olympic Association (BOA) chairman Sir Hugh Robertson said that Team GB athletes and staff were "doing everything possible to minimise risk" in the lead-up to the Olympic Games. Robertson promised the hosts that the BOA would "do everything we can to get the…

In Paris towards the end of June, there was a final, almost desperate scramble for archery places available for Tokyo. In the end, more than 70 countries made the journey to France for a three-day qualifier. There were 44 men’s teams and 34 women’s teams trying their luck, despite overwhelming odds. The competition ended up awarding 14 women’s places and 16 men’s places, including three teams each for men and women, with the last individual places scrapped out among the smaller archery nations and the handful of big ones who had come up empty-handed in one column. A couple more were added by North Korea’s refusal to attend the Games. The men’s individual qualifier tournament was won by the imposing Galzan Bazarzhapov of Russia, and the women’s was won by…

The greatest? Park Sung-Hyun once described her archery medals as “gifts I’ve received along with my coach… If anything, I think I’ve had more luck than other people.” But Sung-Hyun dominated archery in the 2000s, taking three gold medals and a silver from the Athens and Beijing Olympics, along with a raft of other titles and a near-mythical world record that still stands. She competed in an era when the Korean archery team demanded a relentless professionalism that the rest of the world is still only just catching up on, itself an iteration of South Korea’s tough-it-out, quasi-military approach to Olympic sport. “I like the pressure. For me, stress is something positive. Most foreign archers have a job, they see it as a hobby for the weekend – even the…

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Merlin Archery has a unique place in our sport’s history. For nearly 50 years, it has been championing, developing and manufacturing compound bows, taking the discipline from relative obscurity to one of complete acceptance and familiarity throughout the UK and Europe. In 2014 Merlin chose to rebrand the manufacturing arm of the business as Mybo and, using its pedigree, has released a line of compound bows that rival the best on the market yet are affordably priced compared with rival offerings. The latest challenge was to create a compound bow that was completely reimagined from the ground up while maintaining the feel and ethos of the brand, a bow that contains all the latest technology and features but remains easy to set up and instinctive to shoot. After many months…

GBR international Naomi Folkard gave birth to her first child in March this year, and is on the archery team for the Tokyo Olympics in July. She shared her experience of shooting while pregnant. When I first got pregnant I knew nothing about having babies, it was kind of petrifying, I’d never even changed a nappy. I got a lot of stuff from Rikki Bingham. She's a coach now, but she had her first children when she was still shooting. Vic Barby also had a lot of really good information for me. She went away to the European 3D championships, with her baby while still breastfeeding. I got so much information and inspiration from those two. At about three months into the pregnancy I got to the point where I…

Easton has announced a new shaft in their traditional line of arrows. The Carbon Legacy comes complete with three 4” left wing helical feathers, including a traditional barred index feather with combinations of solid red, white, and bright yellow hen feathers. “We really wanted to make the Carbon Legacy something special,” stated Gary Cornum, Easton Marketing Director. “We went back into our archives and found some of Doug Easton's 1920’s arrows and borrowed ideas from his original wood shafts to inspire the look we were going for.” Legacy is available in 340, 400, 500, 600, and 700 spines, and includes RPS inserts and 6.5mm 3D Super Nocks. The US price is expected to be around $70 for a 6-pack, feather-fletched.…

What are the odds? Readers with very long memories may remember Bet Ted, Bow International's mysterious betting shop kingpin. We gave Ted one more phone call to see what we prices we could squeeze out of him for the Tokyo Games. (If you want each-way, he says to leave a message at the track and he'll see what he can do.) Starter's orders! RECURVE INDIVIDUAL MEN Brady Ellison 6/4 Oh Jin Hyek 12/5 Kim Woojin 3/1 Mete Gazoz 4/1 Pablo Acha 7/1 BET TED says: “Used to be a mugs game, betting on the Korean men in even years. Bottlers, the lot of 'em. If you think Kim Woojin has finally got what it takes, open yer wallet. I like the Brady lad, if he can get over the jet…

In the second lockdown, German company TEC-HRO launched the beta version of their training device, designed to shoot the bow "normally" without having to shoot an arrow. This is possible by a carbon tube, similar to a stabiliser, from which a kind of 'arrow' protrudes. This arrow is screwed to the string and transfers the energy delivered to the arrow during firing into the "thicker" tube. Thus, it is possible to fire "dry shots" without affecting the bow limbs, as is the case when the bow is shot without an arrow. On the side of the outer tube is an attachment to be able to attach the Recurvetrainer to the threads for the button and arrow rest with the help of two screws. This is not the first such device;…

The archery calendar in an Olympic year is at risk of becoming a series of sideshows to the 'big dance' itself. Getting to the Olympics is now so important, so coveted, that it tends to consume all the energy of the archery world. This is hardly surprising, because Olympic qualification has long-term knock-on effects to national sides, budget, coaches, careers, and even the direction of archery in your nation over the next generation. It's understandable, but a shame when it begins to overshadow the European Championships, a competition with a long history stretching back to 1968. In the familiar beach resort setting of Antalya, the delayed (from 2020) meet came with a similarly delayed Olympic qualification sidecar, with four places for men and four places for women available. These were,…

The rescheduled Summer Olympics, delayed from 2020, were intended to be held in a world that had brought the pandemic under control. When they were postponed, there was an optimism that Tokyo 2020 would go ahead in some kind of relative ‘normality’. Of course, that’s not the case. The western world is a shifting mess of lockdowns, vaccination programmes, third, fourth and fifth waves of variant viruses, quarantine procedures, strained public health systems, torpid economies and all the rest that COVID-19 has dragged along with it. The Olympics ultimately relies on certainty; it works only because it doesn’t move on the calendar. You can’t delay it for a couple of days while you fix a few things. It’s a performance of logistics on a titanic scale. If one aspect of…