Not many of us know much about archery competition, and probably less about archery competition in the Olympics. With the 2008 Olympic Summer Games to be held soon in China, maybe this short article will help to make watching archery more enjoyable.
The Olympic games in 1900 Paris was the first appearance of archery. 7 events in varying distances were contested. The next Olympics in 1904 St. Louis had 5 archery events but no athletes from outside the United States competed. At the 1908 Summer Olympics, there were 3 archery events. Archery was not featured at the 1912 Summer Olympics but reappeared in the 1920 Summer Olympics.
Between 1920 and 1972, archery was not contested at the Olympic games. The archery competition at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich consisted of two events - men's individual and women's individual. This form of competition was held until the 1988 Summer Olympics, when team competition was added. Starting at the 1992 Summer Olympics head-to-head matches were adopted, and has been used ever since.
1972 saw the beginning of the modern archery competition at the Olympic Games. The events began to use standardized forms and many nations competed. Qualification spots in archery are allotted to National Olympic Committees rather than to individual athletes.
There were four ways for NOCs to earn berths in Olympic archery. Each NOC is allowed to enter three archers of each gender. For each gender, the host nation is guaranteed three spots. The most recent World Target Competition's top 8 teams (besides the host nation) each receive three spots, and the 19 highest ranked archers after the team qualifiers are removed also earn spots for their country. 15 of the remaining 18 spots are divided equally among the five Olympic continents for allocation in continental tournaments. The last three spots in each gender are determined by invitation.
Each National Olympic Committee that receives three places for individual archers (i.e., the host nation, the top 8 teams at the World Target Competition, and any other nation that is able to take 3 of the remaining 37 places) is able to have its three archers compete as a team in the team competition.
Olympic archery consists of four medal events: men's individual, women's individual, men's team, and women's team. In all four events, the distance from the archer to the target is 70 meters.
In the individual competitions, 64 archers compete. The competition begins with the ranking round. Each archer shoots 72 arrows. They are then ranked by score to determine their seeding for the single-elimination bracket. After this, final rankings for each archer is determined by the archer's score in the round in which the archer was defeated, with the archers defeated in the first round being ranked 33rd through 64th.
The first elimination round pits the first ranked archer against the sixty-fourth, the second against the sixty-third, and so on. In this match as well as the second and third, the archers shoot simultaneously 18 arrows. The archer with the higher score after 18 arrows moves on to the next round while the loser is eliminated.
After three elimination rounds, there are 8 archers remaining. The remaining three rounds (quarterfinals, semifinals, and medal matches) are referred to as the finals rounds. They consist of each archer firing 12 arrows. The two archers in the match alternate instead of firing their arrows simultaneously as in the first three rounds. The losers of the quarterfinals are eliminated, while the losers of the semifinals play each other to determine the bronze medal and fourth place. The two archers who are undefeated through the semifinals face each other in the gold medal match, with the winner taking the gold medal while the loser receives the silver medal.
Each country that has three archers in the individual competition also gets to compete as a team. The same three archers from the individual competition must compete as the country's team. Their scores in the individual ranking round are added to determine the team's ranking round score.
The first team round is the round of 16, with the highest ranked teams typically getting a bye in the first round. Matches consist of each team firing 27 arrows with each archer on the team firing 3 arrows. Advancement and medals are determined in the same manner as the individual competition.
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