# If South Korea now produces the world's best Olympic archers which country is next?



## archeryal (Apr 16, 2005)

The Dutch are pretty strong, especially male recurve (lots of lefties, too). Cool uniforms and they speak good English well.


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

My experience with some countries is still small, but I wholly believe no one is quite close to the Koreans right now. The amount of financial support they get is ridiculous. It's not even necessarily from the government, either. Many large Korean companies have their paid pro teams that compete around the country. And the competition in the country is legendarily difficult.

There are very few countries that come even close. In very few countries can you make a living from archery, and in Olympic archery I only know of Brady and the Koreans that can comfortably do it. You do see a lot of compounds that can do it, but that market is very different from the Olympic style market, much more closely tied with the hunting disciplines as well. 

I also agree with your idea that compound might be the next discipline to fall to the Koreans. It makes sense; all of those archers they produce that can't quite make the national team might start looking for other avenues to keep going, and clearly there's more than enough funding to go around in that country. So I would expect to see a few of their second tier archers make the jump, and as we all know Korean second tier is still extremely competitive internationally. 

I do disagree slightly on your rationale for their success, though. Not to say that Koreans don't have strong discipline; it takes a lot of it to rebuild a country over 50 years to a leading world economy. But ultimately we have to remember that high performance sports is self-sustaining to a degree: people get interested in popular sports because they see them a lot, so there's more talent available, so there's more popularity. I would argue that anyone that can make it to the Olympics has comparable levels of dedication and discipline, but not everyone has 30 years of financial backing behind them, and that momentum is hard to change. To summarize my ramblings, I'd point it more on the financial inertia that the sport has nowadays than the individual skill and dedication of the individual athletes.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

archeryal said:


> The Dutch are pretty strong, especially male recurve (lots of lefties, too). Cool uniforms and they speak good English well.


agree...many European nations are producing good results sporadically but not yet consistently..

i'm hoping some Southeast Asian countries--like ours--can also do this but so far progress is slow..

i really like the South Korean model but very few countries can emulate this...the strong natural discipline is just not there--yet--although Japan and China have it already..


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

another related question if i may..just when did the USA lose their grip here?...and why?


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

Chinese Taipai will be next. India would if they spent any money on their program. 

In my opinion, 
The USA lost their way in the 2000s once the program went biomechanical with BEST and has continued from there. I wont say more because it will start a flame war. 

The USA stopped capitalizing on talent and started changing talent to a pre concieved notion of what form should be. 



Chris


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

chrstphr said:


> Chinese Taipai will be next. India would if they spent any money on their program.
> 
> In my opinion,
> The USA lost their way in the 2000s once the program went biomechanical with BEST and has continued from there. I wont say more because it will start a flame war.
> ...


good insights chrstphr...

i am not looking for any blame on this thread but rather genuine opinions on which countries are on the right track and perhaps even close to approaching South Korea's dominance in this sport.

i can certainly see one of the 2 Chinas or even both as their closest rivals right now but am not that familiar with the progress of other countries specially those in Europe..

i also see some of my countrymen reach the highest level when they migrated to another country--ie--Crispin Duenas in Canada--so what does it really take for more of these to happen..

i'm assuming the level of training they get is much better than what they got here so is it really all about the training regimens or something else.. 

i see Italy producing excellent results in the Olympics in the men's side so why not in the women's..

am just really putting all these out there for possible discussions in the hope that we can all learn from each other's experiences..


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

Here's the thing, though: These countries we are mentioning are good, there's no doubt about it. They produce some excellent archers, and many of them can beat the Koreans quite often. But the overall environment is still far from the Korean environment.

Here's some simple data: Here is some scores from a recent tournament in Korea. Ku Bonchan and Kim Beobmin are in there, so it's probably a decently representative tournament. Compare the score spread to the results from the last Olympics. Barring the two no-shows and one bad score at the bottom of the Korean tournament, all the scores are comparable. This tells us that the Koreans are domestically shooting at the level of the Olympics.

Meanwhile, let's grab results from the Netherlands to compare. This tournament includes Sjef van den Berg and Steve Wijler, so I'll also assume this is representative. The top scores are still good, and there's still a lot of good archers, but the scores are definitely not comparable. Of around 60 archers, the other tournaments had one or two archers shooting less than 300 at 70m; this one has over 20.

Of course, this is not conclusive data, and my Korean is still not fantastic while I don't speak Dutch at all, so I don't know what level these tournaments are supposed to be. But I think it still presents a pretty grim picture for the comparison of other countries' archery programs to Korea.


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

Returns are ever related to investments, if investments are well managed. 

So said, the investment in archery form Korea as a country has been so huge and already lasting for so many years that they are in a dominant position since end of 80's and will stay there for many years to come. 

Therefore, to look for the second one to come, you have to look were the money is in archery since many years already. 

In my knowledge, for cumulated investment let say from 1984 to now, Italy comes second, and France comes third. All other countries have been managing much lower budgets in same years, USA included. 

In the age of the double FITA round, in any case a single good talent could be generated in remote country , come out suddenly and win a world championships, but today to train archers to matches at top level you need huge money. Countries have to pay around 2500 US$ average to send an archer to Shaghai to shoot may be 72 + 9 arrows and be trained on the 9 arrows only. Based on money, this is giving an incredible additional advantage to Korea, were archers can be trained at top level in matches without leaving their country. In all other countries, local top archers are very limited in number, so there is no matchplay tension in competition apart from the few situation when the top national team members compete one against the other. And even in that situation, the tension i very far to be the same as in a world cup. No money, not enough archers, not enough training not enough archers 

Taipei has a long tradition in archery, not to forget their first foreign coach in early 90's has been Kim Kyung Tak. Asian games and politic situation are pushing them to the top, and for sure they are there to stay.

In rest of the world, we are still bound to individuals talents emerging from local small realities, or picked up in national programs sometime in a quite casul way. 

Nope against Korea.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

Vittorio..so in the long run it all boils down to money or which country has the most resources to best identify the raw talent and sustain their development and training until

they reach the highest levels attainable in their sport..


...and it also involves the political will to choose just what sport to commit these resources to..


i presume all these decisions are done by the sports leaders in each country in coordination with the public and private sector potential benefactors..


i applaud the countries and their leaders who have been successful in this endeavour so far...


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

jmvargas said:


> i doubt if anyone will argue my premise so which country is next?
> 
> when archery got back to the Olympics in 1972 the USA was clearly the dominant nation in Olympic archery but was soon overshadowed by South Korea..
> 
> ...


To comment on - not intending to nitpick -- South Korean women started dominating in the 80's, but on the men's side the USA men dominated through the 2000 games with, off the top of my head, 5 individual gold medals and 2 (at least) individual silver medals in the first 28 years (first 7 modern Olympics) since reinstatement in 1972.


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

chrstphr said:


> Chinese Taipai will be next. India would if they spent any money on their program.
> 
> In my opinion,
> The USA lost their way in the 2000s once the program went biomechanical with BEST and has continued from there. I wont say more because it will start a flame war.
> ...


Bingo! Thankfully Major League Baseball didn't go this way, and refrained of trying to cookie-cutter pitchers, which would have robbed us of the excellence (with wildly different forms and motions) of such greats as Greg Maddux, Nolan Ryan, Juan Marichal, Sandy Koufax, Luis Tiant, Randy Johnson, Verlander, etc, etc. Identify/Encourage/Enable/Reveal/Polish ...

And, of course, Vittorio makes his usual brilliant and 'spot on' analysis, schooling most of us here. The change in 'medal competition format', and the huge advantage it gives Korea and its superior numbers of high level archers as a training ground in match play .... this makes perfect sense - thanks Vittorio!


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## erose (Aug 12, 2014)

Just to piggyback on PregnantGuppy's post #8, when you look at the numbers from these National Tournaments...man, Korea is just so far beyond the rest of us it just isn't funny.

The Korean National tournament was a traditional Fita in with 54 out of 60 male archers shot a 1300 or better. The lowest 1300 scoring archer shot a 318 at 70m. Times that by two and you have 636, which I'm going to use below:

In the last Olympics 54 out of 64 archers shot a 636 or better. In the Netherland's National Tournament linked above 13 out of 52 shot a 636 or better, and at the recent Gator cup 12 out of 62 archers shot a 636 or better. In the recent Shanghai World Cup 78 out of 114 archers shot a 636 or better.

So from this data, shooting in a National Tournament in Korea is at least as competitive as the Olympics, and almost as competitive as a World Cup. That is impressive.

Please note I just compared the men as samples.


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## lees (Feb 10, 2017)

PregnantGuppy said:


> I also agree with your idea that compound might be the next discipline to fall to the Koreans. It makes sense; all of those archers they produce that can't quite make the national team might start looking for other avenues to keep going, and clearly there's more than enough funding to go around in that country. So I would expect to see a few of their second tier archers make the jump, and as we all know Korean second tier is still extremely competitive internationally.


Well, if the current S. Korean compound shooters are second tier, they have a pretty darn good second tier . Which is your point, of course, and I totally agree. In fact, some stars are forming on the compound side, like SO Chaewon and KIM Jongho. When Mr. Kim shoots a 9, my eyebrows rise since I'm so used to seeing him just shoot 10 after 10. So I think Korea is really starting to take compound seriously. 

As for the OP's question, I'm not sure there's going to be a next-Korea. At least not for a long time. The reason is just simply what sport is important in different countries; in S. Korea, archery is just a very important sport. In the US, the compound is an -ish kinda sorta here and there important sport, with only a very small elite/superb group of shooters able to actually make a living doing it. The olympic recurve is much further down the list even than that; so much so that we even almost-unceremoniously ditched one of our very best (Jake Kaminski) because he couldn't make a tournament in China one year, and the finger pointing on that one is still going round and round. Sorry dude, we can't carry ya, so you're out of the game - you can still shoot flights at Vegas tho if you want. I don't know how the Koreans would handle something like that, but I'm not sure they would have been that ready to just throw away one of their elite archers like we did and barely give it a second thought. I don't know all the details on that, but it sure didn't seem like how you'd want to treat one of your elites in a sport. 

But on the compound side, I do see it spreading around the world like wildfire. Even in my lifetime I've seen the compound bow go from a 3rd-class citizen that was run off collegiate practice fields when the "real bows" started showing up for practice and asked to please not come back, to a peer of the olympic recurve even in Korea. That's what, a mere 25 or 30 years for a near total transformation of the status of the compound bow over most of the entire planet. 

So that's an enormous new variable to have been thrown into the mix, as far as the chances of other countries dethroning S. Korea. I don't know if that'll affect who may bump Korea off the #1 spot or not, but I suppose it's possible....

lee.


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## j.conner (Nov 12, 2009)

I tend to think it is the financial and career aspect that drives it. Archery in the US is a niche sport, really more like a hobby, that few can make a living at. This pattern is repeated outside Asia and even much of Asia itself. It is not a rockstar sport like basketball, baseball, football, or soccer with widespread participation, viewership, facilities, school support, equipment availability, career opportunities, post-career opportunities, etc. There is alot of money and cultural support in the entire ecosystem surrounding those sports. In Korea, archery is more like that. In the Western world, you get bragging rights and maybe a dribble of ongoing income from authoring a book, a product, or teaching/coaching.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

ok..so it seems the South Korean domination will be here for a long time coming and i agree..

and with regards to the Jake Kaminsky incident if it happened to the South Koreans----they will have many waiting in the wings as replacements so it's not a big deal..

my own guess as to a far 2nd right now will probably among the 2 Chinas and Italy...with India right behind..


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## lees (Feb 10, 2017)

jmvargas said:


> and with regards to the Jake Kaminsky incident if it happened to the South Koreans----they will have many waiting in the wings as replacements so it's not a big deal..


Well as I said, I have to plead ignorance on how that would be handled in Korea. I do know that here in the US, archery is practically a fringe sport, so the powers-that-be didn't seem to blink an eyelash at tossing aside one of their elite level recurve archers. You slip up even once, make the eensiest mistake, and we don't want to ever talk to you or have you darken the doors of our training center ever again. 

See ya....

And, of course, throwing away an elite athlete like that knowing full well the pool of available replacements is dangerously small on top of that. That speaks a heck of a lot to the attitude right there if you're willing to slit a wrist with such a tiny, shallow margin for recovery available for your recurve program. Would the Koreans do something like that even if their depth were as small as ours is? I have no idea, so I could be wrong. 

But I do submit that that kind of treatment is probably a significant component of why the US is so far behind in recurve archery, particularly S. Korea. The compound bow is significantly more respectable here, though even there you hear about heads being lopped off from time to time. But for recurve, we won't be nipping at the heels of Korea for quite a while when/if, goodness forbid, Brady Ellison and our other few elite olympic style shooters finally retire. And I've already suggested the reasons for that....

lee.


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

My two cents the pocket American men's history looks like we peaked c. 1984 and you have to discount 1996 as hosts because it doesn't fit the general trend. Then the past two Olympics we have rebounded but that leans heavy on Brady. That being said the supporting cast around Brady is swapping out so it'll also be a question of if Requa et al. can be as good as Kaminiski et al.

I think Korea took off economic development wise in the 1980s and you had a conjunction between that and passion for the sport. They did well in their home Olympics and then thereafter. In that sense I think the progression is misleading, because Korea before 1988 would have been a poorer country spending less on sport and dealing with their domestic situation. It's now an economic powerhouse and a democracy without dictatorship issues.

In recurve I think it simply boils down to the Koreans being more professionalized with the combination of the Chaebol teams to support more archers, and then their national system that feeds off that and pits them against each other. I'd be interested how a country as big as we are would do if the sport was better publicized, more known to kids coming up, and professionalized in terms of opportunities, even at a modest level. There is nothing inherent in Koreans being better.

Compound I see two phases happening, first it has already gone from US dominated to more shared. And then if it becomes more shared there will be a space for Korea to come in and take. They already are competitive but if they decide they want to take compound as seriously and support it the same way it'll look similar.

I think if it becomes more professionalized there is more pressure on to get the results to justify the spending. There may be ideas in coaches' heads of what the future archer should look like, but they need results. I think a more amateurish approach is more obsessed with trends. US Soccer can't quite decide if the better route to close the gap is a historical emphasis on athletes and team defense, or adopting a more finesse approach. So lately we have hired coaches to implement a prettier ground game. The results we used to get are fading and I argue we're now a second rate finesse team with a crap defense instead of playing to strengths. Playing to strengths you wouldn't go around trying to force the system onto the pool. You'd identify where the pool strengths lie and build a system that hones them further. That is more likely to produce results than some abstract project, at least in the short term. if you want a different archer then you need 10-15 years to see it out, and complete buy in.

IMO if you want to encourage prospects to grow in some way, you start it at U10 alongside your country's historical strengths. But at the senior level it should be more about performance. If you're trying to take the emerging high scorers and redo their "swing" you're too late. That should have been done in development. In reality the senior team should be working with its members on their own terms and not trying to rebuild them at what should be a honing stage. I could understand the coach having a couple projects but to me it's odd to have this USAT system that makes the archers prove their worth in their style likely with coaching already, and then you want to grab them up at the end and refashion them into some implemented national style. Strange. US Soccer missed their first world cup after getting in a coach who was trying to make them a more finesse team. Lots of time was spent on that and not on identifying 4 basically competent defenders who could stop another team. To me I think the "pool" should wag the "national style" not the other way around, and if you want to change what the pool looks like that is a long term youth project and not a "cherry pick RAs and implement it."


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

I'd also say that from a team selection perspective, one could argue it sets you up for more likely success, at least early in the season, to pick your team in the spring for that summer. The Koreans as I understand it have a trials process in the spring. So you are literally picking the "hot" archers of the spring. I could see some potential issues with when you peak for that process, and that they might not be the best at the end of the year since one has to ramp up so hard early just to make the team.

But the US picks the team the year before. What if you slump the next year in a totally new season? In theory it gives you more time to prepare but in reality it gives more time to cool off. MLS soccer followed a similar approach for North American champions league tournament qualifying. As a result every couple years you'd have some team that earned a spot a year earlier coming in in the midst of a rebuild, and they'd get destroyed. MLS has now reworked it where the teams winning titles at the end of 2017 are the 2018 representatives starting in February.

If you wanted a more competitive US team out of the gate but not a trials system like Korea, you might have rolling USAT qualifying or run the last "season" through the beginning of the next year. So it maybe includes Indoor Nationals or indoor world cup or Arizona, and you have to be still doing well right up to the new international season. Or have an additional trials tournament for the best 16 or so scorers, pre-season, that counts for who makes it alongside the last series points.

Our approach allows the coach more time to prepare for the season with the selectees but also allows more chance for the selectees to have peaked the previous year and not be the same. I mean, the last tournament qualifying an archer to be on our team is in September and they start representing us in, what, April? We "start" Olympic qualifying on that timeframe (and then end it the next spring). But for world cup that's when it "ends."


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

Azzurri said:


> My two cents the pocket American men's history looks like we peaked c. 1984 and you have to discount 1996 as hosts because it doesn't fit the general trend. Then the past two Olympics we have rebounded but that leans heavy on Brady. That being said the supporting cast around Brady is swapping out so it'll also be a question of if Requa et al. can be as good as Kaminiski et al.
> 
> I think Korea took off economic development wise in the 1980s and you had a conjunction between that and passion for the sport. They did well in their home Olympics and then thereafter. In that sense I think the progression is misleading, because Korea before 1988 would have been a poorer country spending less on sport and dealing with their domestic situation. It's now an economic powerhouse and a democracy without dictatorship issues.
> 
> ...


In the last 4 Olympics (2004 - 2016), the Korean men have won 2 individual golds and 1 individual silver.

From 1984, in the next 4 Olympics, the USA's medal record was 
1988 - Jay Barrs Gold USA
1996 - Justin Huish Gold USA
2000 - Vic Wunderlee Silver USA

Not sure how that entire 1988-2000 time frame can reasonably be discounted.


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

lees said:


> The olympic recurve is much further down the list even than that; so much so that we even almost-unceremoniously ditched one of our very best (Jake Kaminski) because he couldn't make a tournament in China one year, and the finger pointing on that one is still going round and round. Sorry dude, we can't carry ya, so you're out of the game - you can still shoot flights at Vegas tho if you want. I don't know how the Koreans would handle something like that, but I'm not sure they would have been that ready to just throw away one of their elite archers like we did and barely give it a second thought.
> 
> lee.


South Korea would have done worse. Jake lost his pay and benefits because he chose not to shoot a required tournemant. His employer fired him so to speak, but he is free to make the team again, he choose not to.

Back in the late 1990s, a few weeks before the World Champs, the four top Korean archers refused to do a training exercise. They were supposed to carry a small boat up a mountain. The archers felt they may injure their wrists. With World champs weeks away, they refused. South Korea Archery banned all four from anything archery. Losing their job, pay, benefits, and ability to even enter an archery tournament. 3 of them were banned permanently. One got to come back four years later. The one that came back shot at Athens. He is now a coach in South Korea. 

Jake wasnt banned in anything. South Korea demands obediance. Can you imagine USA archery banning Brady and Jake and Zack etc permanently because they refused to run laps at the OTC? Thats what Korea did to their four best.


They sent the number 6-8 to the World champs that year and didnt think twice about it. And made a point to set an example for all the rest of the archers who didnt want to follow the coaching.

Chris


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## ryan b. (Sep 1, 2005)

I witnessed some track athletes refuse to do a similarly idiotic training protocol of sprinting a big rock up a big hill with sketchy unsafe footing (obedience or not, it’s prettyy poor coaching..) and the coach benched them at the next meet. 
The coach found a new job soon after.. perhaps when you have tons of athletes waiting in line you can get away with bad coaching ideas. Too bad for the athletes.


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## JimDE (Aug 3, 2008)

I am surprised with the world power push China is on that no one has picked them as the next country to lead the archery ranks. They have the population, money, and desire to be number 1 in the world in every category. To me it seems logical that they will soon be the dominant player in archery once they put their sights on it.


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

The boat exercise was a team building exercise. They still do many similar training exercises. Hiking mountains, supplying coal to homes with older residents on mountainsides, bungee jumping, diving off high dives, military training etc.

I cant say the training methods, or if the coaching is obsessive or not, but you cant argue its not effective.

Chris


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

JimDE said:


> I am surprised with the world power push China is on that no one has picked them as the next country to lead the archery ranks. They have the population, money, and desire to be number 1 in the world in every category. To me it seems logical that they will soon be the dominant player in archery once they put their sights on it.


Something happened in their program. The past 6-8 years they have not produced the competitive teams as they did 2000-2008. I dont know if its mismanagement or no money allotted but 2008 was their peak and they have disappeared since then with very few podium finishes. 

Chris


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

1984:
USM: GS (indiv) ROK M: zip
1988:
USM G (indv) S (team) ROK M: G (team) S (indiv) --- team already beating us and even on medal count (women sweep)
1992:
USM: zip ROK: S (indiv) --- outperformed
1996:
USM at home: G (indiv) G (team) ROK M: B (indiv) S (team) --- better at home but even on medal count
2000:
USM: S (indiv) B (team) ROK M: G (team) (women sweep) --- as a team we're passed and they win
2004:
USM: no medals ROK M: G (team) (3 women medals) --- consecutive team golds
2008:
USM: no medals ROK M: S (indiv) G (team) --- three team golds in a row
2012:
USM: S (team) ROK M: B (team) G (indiv)
2016:
USM: B (indiv) S (team) ROK M: G (indiv) G (team)

Because medal haul in that period is misleading. I think 1988 team gold signals a shift in overall dominance even though on paper we were even on medal count. We then do nothing in 1992 and they keep getting medals. We do win 1996 at home but they manage medals, and then in 2000 you start a string of their gold medal teams. We did get medals but not gold in 2000, and they are the gold team that year. And then you basically concede after that.

You can at best "reasonably" argue for a 1996-2000 blip and by 2000 it was already fading and they were gold team. I see 2000 as more like 2016 where an individual carried us to some medals but none were gold, and the better team is obvious. The fact we flip between medals and nothing, versus them winning at team and generally getting something every time, says it flipped as of 1988. Before that I would have said we were the big dog.


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

FWIW the USSR had a similar cold war pattern and then have you heard of Olympic podium Russian men much since. We have come back in a couple "pushes," 1996-2000 and then the present one (and we'll see where it slots in globally with a rebuild), but to me this suggests key factors since 1988 are individual talents of unique ability and financial support for the team. For the women I would add constant roster churn that probably mixes family goals with amateur style funding. 

One big difference I see M vs F is that with the exception of some from that 1996-2000 burst, the men keep accreting new talent around people from previous Olympics who are also competing. The women almost have to start over each time. Imagine if you could pick from everyone competing from the last 5 cycles, plus the newcomers.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

JimDE said:


> I am surprised with the world power push China is on that no one has picked them as the next country to lead the archery ranks. They have the population, money, and desire to be number 1 in the world in every category. To me it seems logical that they will soon be the dominant player in archery once they put their sights on it.


Please see my post #16..


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

Azzurri said:


> 1984:
> USM: GS (indiv) ROK M: zip
> 1988:
> USM G (indv) S (team) ROK M: G (team) S (indiv) --- team already beating us and even on medal count (women sweep)
> ...


I wasn't, and am not, arguing against SKorean men's ascendancy the last 4 Olympic cycles. Just disagreeing with your narrative/interpretation of 1988-2000 ...
1988 - 2000
Combined team and individual Olympic medals .... SKorea 2gold, 3silver, 1bronze; USA 3gold, 2silver, 1bronze ... 
We win team and individual gold in '96, and bracket that with team and individual Olympic medals in 1988, and again medal in both categories in 2000 ... so, 6 medals combined count for both countries (with USA ahead on Gold count), but somehow it's reasonable to interpret this as "SKorea is kicking ass while USA is to be discounted/dismissed as a blip"? That doesn't look like an accurate interpretation of that time period to me. 

Party on, Garth.


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## lees (Feb 10, 2017)

chrstphr said:


> South Korea would have done worse. Jake lost his pay and benefits because he chose not to shoot a required tournemant. His employer fired him so to speak, but he is free to make the team again, he choose not to.
> 
> Back in the late 1990s, a few weeks before the World Champs, the four top Korean archers refused to do a training exercise. They were supposed to carry a small boat up a mountain. The archers felt they may injure their wrists. With World champs weeks away, they refused. South Korea Archery banned all four from anything archery. Losing their job, pay, benefits, and ability to even enter an archery tournament. 3 of them were banned permanently. One got to come back four years later. The one that came back shot at Athens. He is now a coach in South Korea.
> 
> ...


Ah, I stand corrected. 
I'm still left to wonder, though, if the Koreans did that just Because They Could? Or would they still have done that if those 4 guys were their only 4 guys and their next best were hardly the next best at all? I guess if there's little or no cost to you, you can get away with decimating your team like that, but I have to wonder if you'd still be so inclined if it were going to really hurt you too along with the athletes you were decimating? Will curing the disease by killing the patient really work and get you the results you want?

Who knows... In that case, I guess it's especially hard to know due to the depth that Korea has. 

And if we do things like that here in the US, well, I guess our ranking tells us the results we get. Though we have trouble enough as it is without mistreating our athletes, so how much more effective a Tough Love approach where we make examples out of one or two (or 4) here and there would really be may not be truly known.... 

So I dunno....

lee.


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

lees said:


> And if we do things like that here in the US, well, I guess our ranking tells us the results we get. Though we have trouble enough as it is without mistreating our athletes, so how much more effective a Tough Love approach where we make examples out of one or two (or 4) here and there would really be may not be truly known....
> 
> So I dunno....
> 
> lee.


ever wonder why the World Champs team trials this time are the last two tournaments this year? Outdoor nationals and Buckeye in August? 

The previous years, its been Arizona cup and Gator cup. The first two tournaments. 

There is a reason why USA archery is waiting.......

Chris


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## chang (Sep 16, 2008)

I doubt the Korean model can be and should be emulated anywhere else with a recreational based archery community.

According to Kim Hyung Tak, The Korean system was state run totally, there was no recreational western archery community there at all. Archers were chosen from very young age to train to become Olympic athletes, and Kim even mentioned the few type of physique they used to pick archers. 

In Korean, The few large “Chaebol” companies who supported the few chosen sports, not because they like or need the sport, but their close relationship with their government.


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## Z3R0 (Nov 6, 2014)

jmvargas said:


> good insights chrstphr...
> 
> i am not looking for any blame on this thread but rather genuine opinions on which countries are on the right track and perhaps even close to approaching South Korea's dominance in this sport.
> 
> ...


Pretty sure Crispin was born Canadian...

Sent from my SM-G950W using Tapatalk


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

Z3R0 said:


> Pretty sure Crispin was born Canadian...
> 
> Sent from my SM-G950W using Tapatalk


....you're probably right but he certainly does not deny his Filipino heritage..

but he was just an example..

it happens in golf too...transplanted Koreans Lydia Ko and MinJee Lee to New Zealand and Australia among many..


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

> The USA stopped capitalizing on talent and started changing talent to a pre concieved notion of what form should be.


Didn't see this post before, but I find it weird that we blame the USA's fall in this philosophy when it's exactly what's carrying Korea right now. They don't even let their archers shoot left-handed; you shoot they way everyone else shoots, or you don't shoot. Clearly there is something more to it, but I am not entirely sure what it would be. 



> I am surprised with the world power push China is on that no one has picked them as the next country to lead the archery ranks.


I didn't get to see some of their best shooters in the early 2000's, but nowadays they don't seem to be quite at the top anymore. I would guess it's because archery is still a niche sport, so it's not the best avenue to display the superiority of their country, and so they don't invest into it as much as more popular sports.


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

PregnantGuppy said:


> Didn't see this post before, but I find it weird that we blame the USA's fall in this philosophy when it's exactly what's carrying Korea right now. They don't even let their archers shoot left-handed; you shoot they way everyone else shoots, or you don't shoot. Clearly there is something more to it, but I am not entirely sure what it would be.


I would disagree. The Korean linear form has many many variations from Oh JinHyek to Yun OkHee to Ki Bobae to Dasomi Jung to Hyejin Chang. Every Korean archer on the Rio Olympic team shot differently and got into the form a different way. The Korean coaches will even tell you NOT to mimic Oh JinHyek, but they dont change him because he wins and is consistent with it. 

you can watch this video and see each of the archers has a totally different draw and anchor. 

https://youtu.be/yz6m5nS0I0o


They dont shoot left handed because they have 1000s of bows in the system that are all right handed. 

Very different approach from BEST and the current NTS (which had the national head coach tell a 640 shooter if he didnt use the NTS hook at the OTC, then he had to leave). 


Chris


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

chrstphr said:


> I would disagree. The Korean linear form has many many variations from Oh JinHyek to Yun OkHee to Ki Bobae to Dasomi Jung to Hyejin Chang. Every Korean archer on the Rio Olympic team shot differently and got into the form a different way. The Korean coaches will even tell you NOT to mimic Oh JinHyek, but they dont change him because he wins and is consistent with it. They dont shoot left handed because they have 1000s of bows in the system that are all right handed.
> 
> Very different approach from BEST and the current NTS (which had the national head coach tell a 640 shooter if he didnt use the NTS hook at the OTC, then he had to leave).
> 
> ...


interesting insights and reminds me of the time that all Taiwanese male pro golfers had identical golf swings as they only had one main mentor in Taiwan at the time so every pro just copied his swing..

they had moderate success with this method in the 70s and 80s but started fading after..

at present they have a few golfers in the PGA and LPGA tours but most of them have their own individual swings..


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

> Very different approach from BEST and the current NTS


Fair enough. I am now more familiar with the Korean system than the USA system, being a foreigner in both countries, so I'll defer to your knowledge on the USA side. I would still hold that the Korean system is one of most (if not the most) homogeneous techniques in the world. Yes, you get individual variation, and Oh Jin Hyeok is a big outlier, but by and large I see way more similarities than in most other countries' teams.

I wasn't trying to state that I like that cookie-cutter mindset, anyways. Coaching like that feels dispassionate, just burning up through the athlete's best years until they can't put in the numbers and then moving on to the next.


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## j.conner (Nov 12, 2009)

chang said:


> I doubt the Korean model can be and should be emulated anywhere else with a recreational based archery community.
> 
> According to Kim Hyung Tak, The Korean system was state run totally, there was no recreational western archery community there at all. Archers were chosen from very young age to train to become Olympic athletes, and Kim even mentioned the few type of physique they used to pick archers.
> 
> In Korean, The few large “Chaebol” companies who supported the few chosen sports, not because they like or need the sport, but their close relationship with their government.


Good point, Chang. I got to spend some time with a group of KNSU archers a while back and one thing they envied is our many recreational archery opportunities. They have none of that there, no fun archery. Very few public ranges and clubs, pretty much just a couple with old guys shooting traditional horse bows in a bit of a clout shoot. You are in the archery system or not, and it is up or out, and nobody does it for fun. That was the impression I got from them and it made me glad that we have a variety of styles and games to enjoy.


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

There are now a number of coffee shops with 10-15 yard archery ranges to give people a taste of archery. They seem to be a huge hit. Maybe soon you will see some outdoor ranges to continue the trend. 


Chris


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## chang (Sep 16, 2008)

Archery shops were more intended for tourist money. and they are part of tour package often offered to the Chinese. 

But fundamentally, The Korean state own sport system is rather similar to the Chinese system, which offered no support to the recreational communities. Traditional archery are supported officially in Korea (again like in China), but mainly for political reasons.


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

chrstphr said:


> There are now a number of coffee shops with 10-15 yard archery ranges to give people a taste of archery. They seem to be a huge hit. Maybe soon you will see some outdoor ranges to continue the trend.


I was about to comment this. There are three indoor ranges in the city I'm in. It's not fantastic equipment, but it's definitely available nowadays. The owner even mentioned that hunting is starting to grow in popularity around here.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

for some reason there also seems to be some kind of popularity surge for archery here as about 5 new indoor ranges 10m to 30M have suddenly opened..

at least 2 are in the malls and others in multi-use buildings..

i just hope they remain open long..


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## ForeverNewbie (Feb 21, 2018)

I will put my bet on the 2 China. 
Both countries/places (lets not get political here...) are starting to have professional archers employed by local government or private firms and their culture is similar to South Korea to adopt South Korean system.
More importantly, at least from what I read from CTAA, they got their priority right, winning medals.

Let's not kid ourselves, winning medals is all about national pride and thus a state affair deserving national funding if such sport dean important for given country. 
Recreational archery is a recreation as its named indicated, is an recreation for individual like gardening (which I enjoy).
It is as crazy as it sound to have state funded gardening with national support for land, tools, and information to start it right (it is not cheaper than archery) as to have state funded recreational archery.


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

ForeverNewbie said:


> ......
> Let's not kid ourselves, winning medals is all about national pride and thus a state affair deserving national funding if such sport dean important for given country.
> Recreational archery is a recreation as its named indicated, is an recreation for individual like gardening (which I enjoy).
> It is as crazy as it sound to have state funded gardening with national support for land, tools, and information to start it right (it is not cheaper than archery) as to have state funded recreational archery.


Great quote, it summarizes in few words why western countries will never be competitive against Korea in archery.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

Different countries have different priorities when it comes to sports but all have one thing in common..

they all want to win as many medals as they can when they enter any international competition..

the one who wins the most are normally those with most resources..

but those countries with limited resources who can identify what sports they can excel in and properly fund and develop those sports can also excel I'm them.. 

..examples are Jamaica in running, Kenya in long-distance running,certain east european countries in weightlifting , etc......

the really rich countries who are also genetically blessed can excel in multiple sports and normally are among the leaders in the overall medal counts..

that's just the way it is..

so..with regards to archery South Korea at present has the best programs and available resources to dominate...

and unless it suddenly becomes a major sports priority for countries with similar resources South Korea will continue to dominate for a long time coming..


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## ForeverNewbie (Feb 21, 2018)

PregnantGuppy said:


> ...
> I didn't get to see some of their best shooters in the early 2000's, but nowadays they don't seem to be quite at the top anymore. I would guess it's because archery is still a niche sport, so it's not the best avenue to display the superiority of their country, and so they don't invest into it as much as more popular sports.


In case you missed it, Oixuan An won an individual silver in Shanghai this year with a riser designed and manufactured by a Chinese company. 
If there is a company willing to invest resource into manufacturing riser sufficient for such level and chosen by their national team, there may be a market and some attention there. 
With 1,4 billion of population, the size of "a niche" there could easily overwhelm the size of "popular" in quite some countries...


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## chang (Sep 16, 2008)

ForeverNewbie said:


> In case you missed it, Oixuan An won an individual silver in Shanghai this year with a riser designed and manufactured by a Chinese company.
> If there is a company willing to invest resource into manufacturing riser sufficient for such level and chosen by their national team, there may be a market and some attention there.
> With 1,4 billion of population, the size of "a niche" there could easily overwhelm the size of "popular" in quite some countries...


Yes, and a immediate price raise after that silver medal, followed by a bold statement "the current second class price is an insult for a world first class riser" by the owner


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

To be the next Korea you would have to outKorea Korea, and maintain it for a period of time. Which gets into training methods, support, prizes, sponsorship, interest, etc. What happens to the USA when Wunderle or Brady fade? If they do find medal worthy mates, what happens when they drop out (Kaminski)? Korea would not blink because the difference is sheer number and the machine producing them keeps going. We can produce high quality archers but in isolation and not bulk. When the isolated talent ages then the team fades. So the real question is why not in bulk. The machine produces, but maybe one guy every decade. You want to keep up it needs to be at least 3 and really more, since people get hurt, quit, etc.

Otherwise we're really talking about who are the trendy teams in the mix for Olympic podia, not the next long term Korea. Holland is accumulating multiple younger podium quality archers ("3 Bradys at a time"). If you have a handful of high quality archers with luck they can sync up and accomplish great things. But meanwhile Korea is producing bushels of the same level archers and cherry picking certain ones.


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## lees (Feb 10, 2017)

Azzurri said:


> To be the next Korea you would have to outKorea Korea, and maintain it for a period of time. Which gets into training methods, support, prizes, sponsorship, interest, etc. What happens to the USA when Wunderle or Brady fade? If they do find medal worthy mates, what happens when they drop out (Kaminski)? Korea would not blink because the difference is sheer number and the machine producing them keeps going. We can produce high quality archers but in isolation and not bulk. When the isolated talent ages then the team fades. So the real question is why not in bulk. The machine produces, but maybe one guy every decade. You want to keep up it needs to be at least 3 and really more, since people get hurt, quit, etc.
> 
> Otherwise we're really talking about who are the trendy teams in the mix for Olympic podia, not the next long term Korea. Holland is accumulating multiple younger podium quality archers ("3 Bradys at a time"). If you have a handful of high quality archers with luck they can sync up and accomplish great things. But meanwhile Korea is producing bushels of the same level archers and cherry picking certain ones.


Well as Christopher suggested in #21, it sounds like Korea's supremacy comes at a price. And to me, sounds like possibly a pretty hefty one. Their approach would seem more to be to apply the sword more often than honey by, among other things, making examples out of individuals here and there to keep the rest in line. Sure, you can build a huge pool of high performing athletes that way; that's certainly a proven method of winning as much as possible. 

But is that really the kind of program we would want to build here? How attractive and effective would such a "machine" be to American archers, or archers in western cultures generally? And who's willing to take that gamble and go down with the ship if it fails to produce or worse? 

So to me, if we want to produce elite level athletes in bulk, we would probably have to also be prepared for the consequences of doing that. The other sports in our country where we produce in bulk would be the places to look, I should think, for how that works and the good and bad of "grinding 'em out" at whatever the cost may be. 

I'll only say this, I'm kind of glad I'm too old to be put through a "machine" of that type; us older fellas don't respond in predictable ways to the sword. Or at least I don't. 

Now, I'm not saying not to consider this approach, only that if we want to compete against others who do implement that approach by emulating it, we should do it with our eyes wide open on the possible consequences and drawbacks of following in their footsteps.

lee.


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## theminoritydude (Feb 11, 2013)

The Dutch don’t look at Koreans.


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

The blindspot I see is that many coaches seem focused on isolated high promise individuals, and there are only so many coaches as interested in broadening participation. The nature of that machine is production of a limited set of archers upon whom most of the attention is focused. Isolated coach's kids (Wunderle) or subjects of hyperfocus may turn out very well, but we don't get enough people participating to make it more of a machine with sheer number and statistics on its side. And if we put our energy into certain kids and x% turn out jerks, burnt out, etc., well, are the ones who got less attention and less success even still around to fill the void.

One reason I keep pushing teams is I think the youth focus needs to broaden. Needing a team to function broadens focus. More teams with more archers getting attention ups the odds of having more archers with promise and then with more archers of promise the chances go up that the team is consistently good and that more individuals are high quality.

And there are big gaps in terms of coverage. I keep going back to I came from a fairly decent size suburb and never heard of archery the sport while trying a long list of sports and playing 3 of them for my schools. If you want to compete with those sports, as well as find fan interest and sponsorship and professionality, your average Joe should be trying it in elementary school like everything else I did. There should be like "catch-all" JOADs set up for covering the big gaps between the existing JOADs, someone responsible for trying to get people in those areas interested. As structured now it all comes down to where the JOAD founders live, and whether you live there or in a gap someplace.


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

Maybe "machine" is a potentially scary and awkward metaphor. I don't mean it as imitate the Koreans.

Point is, even after concussions, when football season starts in the fall, there will be dozens of kids trying to play the sport for each little middle school, high school, college, or pro league. That degree of interest and teams and leagues and levels takes care of itself in terms of participation levels and producing people who can excel at the sport relative to the rest of the world. Ditto baseball, basketball, track and field. To some extent soccer. Whether any one individual stays healthy or passionate or burns out is fairly immaterial. You have a big ol' pile of people pursuing the sport from whom to select. 

Since so many entities have teams, focus can never get narrowed to too few individuals, and no single coach or set of coaches can gatekeep until the very highest levels. If this coach is not impressed maybe that one is. Dozens of college coaches, thousands of high school coaches, want to keep their own jobs. So they are training up thousands of players and trying their best. 

I say machine because at that level of player production, whether you in particular turn out or decide to quit is not that big a deal. Your individual coach might care, your team might miss you, but there will be a hundred plus starting college quarterbacks in the fall, backed up by a few more at each school. US Football's success is not riding on whether your particular arm stays healthy. That is kind of a machine. At a certain level of participation and team and league availability it becomes machine like.

I don't think it has to be a "mean machine." We don't have to emulate the needlessly nasty aspects. But the current version seems to have a limited set of coaching pods, and those coaches often have their favorites, and the competitions are 99% individual, and only one person wins, and the process winnows the limited set who even tried the sport to a handful of perceived stars. There are few team tournaments or leagues, and no one is concerned with the depth of talent development a team usually needs, which extends beyond the star player, who can't win team events alone. Everyone may not start out a star in football, basketball, soccer, whatever, but the coach has to field a team. So all the energy can't go into isolated individuals. So the runt who later has a growth spurt gets enough training and has a place where they can later replace the star wunderkind who burns out. Archery to me would have long since run off the runt with disinterest in favor of the perceived star.

To me part of the problem is that so much of the structure is boutique, and while as a product of a boutique soccer team that only fielded two age group teams at any given time, I get the value of that in terms of getting isolated individuals trained up, it's not the way to get it where like the Koreans we would have 100s of people who could shoot a 300 70m round. That way, to me, is broadening participation and making it more like little league. A league in every chunk of every town. Involvement in school sports. Varsity NCAA/NAIA/etc. You do that and it would be the American cultural equivalent of how Korea machines up their pile of archers.

But if you do it this way, it's going to be boutique teams training up isolated archers and cumulatively probably as many high quality archers as high quality coaching pads. Fairly one to one. You do that you may like the archers you train up because of all the time you spend but when we hit the international level you're bumping up against Koreans who are producing so many more archers. If we have cherry picked well and the students are studious enough, maybe we compete for medals. If the boutique misfires for a few years, maybe we don't qualify. The way out is make it more like the big team sports in America. The boutique can try to train up the best, but there are jillions of other places to land and pursue your passion, including some that are more nurturing, and by sheer numbers we'd produce a ton of worthy archers, some who were coach favorites on 'select" squads but some who came up through more prosaic programs.

I'm not knocking boutique in an absolute sense, I just think when that is the dominant model it will produce a limited set of star quality archers, and that it's limited by the amount of those kind of coaches and the amount they want to focus on. In soccer every high school has a team and whether some of your teammates would impress your select coach doesn't decide who stays in the sport. If select soccer was the only model of participation, and we played smaller sided teams, then focus would winnow down to fewer players liked by fewer coaches on fewer teams. it has a funneling effect that is much harsher than broader participation.


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## erose (Aug 12, 2014)

I disagree. America has those elite archers in bulk. The problem is they shoot compound, and they are not wasting their time trying to earn a spot on the USAT, because the money is in 3D.

We could produce even more elite archers if (and this is a big if) more than just one or two OR archers could make a living shooting.

Just a few years ago, IMO our best OR archer wasn’t Brady, but Collin Klimitchek. Yet I can only assume that life called, and he had to step away. How many elite archers do we loose to the simple fact of having to make a living? As Victorrio said above money is what is holding our program and others from producing similar results as the Koreans.

The other issue is trying to make a USAT, is expensive; and in my opinion shuts out a lot of potential elite archers, because they can’t afford to go after that dream.

Seriously how many of the best of the best in other sports come from below the poverty line? I would say a great deal of them. But archery especially OR archery is not a poor man’s game. And you don’t have many schools if any, supplying students in their archery programs with good (not great) equipment so they can compete.

Anyway until the money issue changes, we are not going to be competitive, except Brady, long term with the countries serious about archery.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

ForeverNewbie said:


> In case you missed it, Oixuan An won an individual silver in Shanghai this year with a riser designed and manufactured by a Chinese company.


With all due respect: is that all? A single noteworthy medal doesn't put them on the same path as the country that won every single gold medal in the same event you mention. Her achievement is great, especially for a 17 year old. But we're talking about matching a country that has around 50 archers of that same caliber.

The fact that the equipment is manufactured in China is not terribly impressive either, in my mind. They already manufacture equipment for many non-Chinese companies, and it wouldn't take too much for someone there to start manufacturing their own, like many other Chinese replicas that exist for other products. 

Lastly, even if they did have more archers in absolute terms due to their massive size, it's still not worth it for China to invest in archery. They get much more exposure and value from investing in more popular sports. It just doesn't make much financial sense; if there are 10x more archers in China than the USA, then there are also 10x more gymnasts or sprinters or other Olympic sports that get more attention.


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## ForeverNewbie (Feb 21, 2018)

The equipment itself is not my point. 
What I suggested is that it could be a sign of increasing number of participants in target recurve and increasing resources invested into the sport in China.
Thus, they have main two determinants going in the positive direction already and they may keep going.

Considering the long success of South Korea, it will take at least another 10 years after the "fall of South Korea" to evaluate the assumption.
I have no crystal ball seeing the future nor trying to convince anyone, but simply pointing something I find worth noticing.
Since this thread is based on "assumption," I picked my 2 wild cards and explained the basis of my picks, plain and simple.


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

To clarify my boutique point, I am not against boutique. I have developed most as an archer or a soccer player in situations where that coach didn't have many "teams' or "players." My concern, however, is whether a dispersed JOAD model led by coaches who have boutiques is inherently limiting when the idea is to be getting more people interested so more people try the sport. That would increase participation but also might create a latent audience for the sport, like soccer or football or baseball have, where "I played it when I was a kid."

To offer constructive rather than critique, the missing step is little league style dispersion and recreational participation. Right now coverage is spotty and JOADs tend to blend competitive with recreational. There isn't really the "select" versus "recreational" split, even though many coaches all but say they'd personally rather be working with committed ambitious archers with demonstrated talent. OK, you want to coach "select." What we then need is parents and local teams, with basic safety training, to handle the "rec" side where archers are just kicking the tires on the sport and seeing if they like it. And there needs to be more of it because probably every kid at an elementary is getting flyers to try soccer or baseball -- and many do it -- but to me unless you're located just so you don't even bump into archery.

To bring it back to the OP, you do that and by sheer volume of kids (this is a huge country) starting the sport we will close the gap with Korea. The current system, boutique programs, chosen kids, inherently limited, and you're dependent on statistical odds working out from a small set. Find the right kid, medal competitive, wrong ones, off years.


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

Azzurri said:


> To clarify my boutique point, I am not against boutique. I have developed most as an archer or a soccer player in situations where that coach didn't have many "teams' or "players." My concern, however, is whether a dispersed JOAD model led by coaches who have boutiques is inherently limiting when the idea is to be getting more people interested so more people try the sport. That would increase participation but also might create a latent audience for the sport, like soccer or football or baseball have, where "I played it when I was a kid."
> 
> To offer constructive rather than critique, the missing step is little league style dispersion and recreational participation. Right now coverage is spotty and JOADs tend to blend competitive with recreational. There isn't really the "select" versus "recreational" split, even though many coaches all but say they'd personally rather be working with committed ambitious archers with demonstrated talent. OK, you want to coach "select." What we then need is parents and local teams, with basic safety training, to handle the "rec" side where archers are just kicking the tires on the sport and seeing if they like it. And there needs to be more of it because probably every kid at an elementary is getting flyers to try soccer or baseball -- and many do it -- but to me unless you're located just so you don't even bump into archery.
> 
> To bring it back to the OP, you do that and by sheer volume of kids (this is a huge country) starting the sport we will close the gap with Korea. The current system, boutique programs, chosen kids, inherently limited, and you're dependent on statistical odds working out from a small set. Find the right kid, medal competitive, wrong ones, off years.


The numbers - in Oklahoma anyway - don't seem to support this premise of volume solves all. NASP brags that they have 47,000 kids in the NASP school archery program in Oklahoma. That is a volume that dwarfs the entire USA Archery youth membership by, what, a multiple of 4 or 5? And for the past 4 years, USA Archery Oklahoma has reached out to NASP (both individuals, specific school teams, and the Oklahoma NASP admin structure and membership) to recruit and encourage this supposed mountain of budding new archers to participate in USA Archery outdoor target competitions .... and it's crickets loud and clear. Bet we haven't had 3 NASP archers TOTAL in the last 4 years come try outdoor target competitions. 

Around the time that Schwarzenegger was, through the strength of his magnetic personality (and dominating physique, of course), making bodybuilding a much more popular activity back in the 70's, there was a prevalent attitude amongst the general population that "well, I don't want to lift weights in the gym because I don't want to look like Arnold." Actually, Arnold had a wonderfully flip and incisive response when asked "What do you say to people who repel and say 'I wouldn't want to look like him.' ?" His response was a chuckle and "Don't worry, you never will." ??? These people were akin to saying I don't want to take my Spalding tennis racket and go hit a tennis ball around for a half hour because I don't want to be Wimbledon Champion ... as if excellence is an equation of volume, inevitable after exposure. 

We're not growing corn, where it's a simple equation of more fields x more seeds = more production. Target archery is HARD to do well. It's to a large extent exclusionary (as 98% of all VCRs are still blinking 12:00). Keep your 47,000 casuals who are 'doing archery' at 10yards on a big target face in air conditioned gyms. I'd much rather have the 500 kids who are motivated/interested enough to google "archery club" or "Olympic Archery" and cultivate/nurture them. 

The shooting technique/coaching philosophy of how to hone the skills of the motivated handful should be the issue, not how to increase attendance to the bowling alley beer league.

Just my view.


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

Number of amateur archers in a country has nothing to do with quality of the Olympic team of the same country. 

In number of amateur archers (hunters excluded), country nbr. 1 is France with > 70,000 or, most probably , already China with ???? thousands...

But Korea has a kind of closed system that keeps training 1500 professionals . Constantly sice many years. They don't need "tens of thousands" of amateurs, just may be 100 new professionals every year to replace those that that retire. The selection is therefore very tough sice the elementary school, as no one is shooting archery for pleasure, but as a possibility to get a good job by it. 
You have to test the childen, and then you also have to discard them. Many of them, very rapidly and very often, as you don't need many to survive. Then you push them to their limits, and you discard even more of them. Until you get around 100 every year good enough to try real archery, let say at 14 year age, and to be pushed even more. Can you do this in your country? Not in mine, for sure ...

Quite often people removes form the history the existance of very strong Soviet Union archery teams from 80's to 90's. You can count medals, they were for sure the second archery power in the world for men and the first one for women. Until Korea came and Soviet union dissolved.
Sistem was based on school of sports in each Republic, were potential archers were picked since elementary school to be trained very hard, and immediately discarted if not reacting properly. It was another situation of good food and glory vs hard work for almost nothing. Those so lucky to be selected were doing everything to remain in the system. Then, teams from Republics were competing annually to form the Soviet Union team. So it was quit normal to have a Geogian, a Moldavian and an Ucrainian in the same team at a major event. 
Just change Soviet Union to Korea and Republics to Business teams, and the system is exactly the same....


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

Antalya World cup is already answering to the question 

https://info.ianseo.net/?tourid=387


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## erose (Aug 12, 2014)

Just to re-emphasize my point above. The USA has some of the best archers in the world...but they aren't shooting recurve. They are shooting compound bows. And many of them aren't trying out for the National Teams, but rather making money on the 3D circuit. Until the USA, and I'm assuming other countries as well, makes it financially more enticing to pick up an OR over a compound bow, and compete for slots on the National team instead of shooting the IBO/ASA 3D circuit; we are just going to be what we are now.


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## Beastmaster (Jan 20, 2009)

A few comments/thoughts...

NASP - let’s be blunt and frank. NASP inflates their numbers in a couple of ways. One is that they count their PE based attendance as part of the shooting corps. 

USA Archery Arizona purposefully creates a Genesis Division for all of their major events. We don’t get attendance even though we promote the events to the NASP schools. 

I’ve seen the gamut of reasons why they don’t attend. Most of the reasons is based upon the intimidation factor. Even the kids running a PSE MiniBurner or Diamond Nuclear Ice has a tendency to shoot faster, farther, and more accurately for not that much more money in investment. So, the Genesis NASP kids tend to not show up. 

The NASP shooters get a hell of a wake up call when they leave high school and shoot real distances in college. So over time, it becomes a challenge to transition people to real world distances. 

NASP also doesn’t necessarily translate out to more people hunting either. So that’s another area where it’s not being that successful, at least in Arizona. 

Success near term vs long term - I really feel that this is impacting all sports. Not just in archery. You have this video game mentality invading Western society to where the players want instant gratification. Look at golf and other sports where they have adapted the sport to increase the chances of success to draw and attempt to keep people in the sport at the lower levels. 

The “everyone is a winner” mentality. Another Western thought process that doesn’t exist in Asia. It’s another thing that is harming us in all sports, not just archery. 

The USA Archery JOAD Pin Process - let’s face it. You win most FITA tournaments in match play. The USA Archery JOAD achievement pin process places emphasis on qualification round scores, not match play. So kids are drawn to thinking their achievements around Ranking rounds, and train accordingly. So, in short, we are training our kids to achieve the wrong thing from a long term process. 

The USA Archery Trials process - I really feel that the trials process is flawed. When do you see round robins in tournaments? Hardly ever. Yet round robins and per arrow averages are emphasized in trials instead of real life scenarios in which the athletes will encounter out in the real world. 

To directly answer the question - I feel that after Korea, the Netherlands have a killer program with the right emphasis on the athlete. Close behind would be China. 

The United States will always be a top 10 powerhouse just from the point that we have the ability to find and refine those occasional diamonds in the rough. Eventually that will run out. 

-Steve


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## chrstphr (Nov 23, 2005)

erose said:


> Just to re-emphasize my point above. The USA has some of the best archers in the world...but they aren't shooting recurve. They are shooting compound bows. And many of them aren't trying out for the National Teams, but rather making money on the 3D circuit. Until the USA, and I'm assuming other countries as well, makes it financially more enticing to pick up an OR over a compound bow, and compete for slots on the National team instead of shooting the IBO/ASA 3D circuit; we are just going to be what we are now.



That transistion is harder than it looks. There have been top compound archers before that tried to make a USA International recurve team. They did not have success. 

Brady is one, Crystal Gavin is the other if you want to count the World indoor we just had. We will see if she makes the World champs team this year, or the Olympic team next year, but the odds are against her. She just doesnt have the required time on the bow and another year wont be enough. Not to mention she wasted a year messing with NTS. That really set her back.

Nothing personal, just the facts of how difficult Olympic recurve is. I think you would be better to try and get the top barebow guys to put accessories on and compete. They would have a much better chance at that.

And to be fair, i have yet to see a recurve archer make a compound USA team for international competition. Same thing. Not enough time on the bow to be top 3 or 4. 

Chris


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

it is much easier to go from recurve to compound than vice versa..

all our national compound archery team members used to be Olympic receivers..both men and women.


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## erose (Aug 12, 2014)

chrstphr said:


> That transistion is harder than it looks. There have been top compound archers before that tried to make a USA International recurve team. They did not have success.
> 
> Brady is one, Crystal Gavin is the other if you want to count the World indoor we just had. We will see if she makes the World champs team this year, or the Olympic team next year, but the odds are against her. She just doesnt have the required time on the bow and another year wont be enough. Not to mention she wasted a year messing with NTS. That really set her back.
> 
> ...


I’m not saying convert the compound guys to recurve, that isn’t the point. My point is that those young men and women with the innate ability and drive to be elite archers are choosing a compound bow for their archery journey over a OR because there is a bigger light at the end of the tunnel. 

If you are a young kid with aspirations to make a living shooting a bow, you aren’t going to shoot OR. Sorry that is just the facts. 

Then you throw in the fact that outside of Vegas the money is in 3D, and 3D is for all intents and purposes a compound bow sport. And talking about Vegas we all know the money there is in the men’s open class, which is compound also. 

My point is that there is a very very small opportunity to earn a living in OR, which at this time can only support two professional archers; vs compound that is supporting at least 10x that number and only getting larger. Because of this OR is not going to attract the best potential, because that potential is going where the best potential money is at.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## erose (Aug 12, 2014)

So to summarize if archers such as Levi Morgan or Jesse Broadwater or Paige Gore, to name just a few, picked up an OR when they were kids and applied the same dedication and drive that has made them great Compound shooters, there is no doubt in my mind, that we would be looking at them in the same light as we now do with Brady.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

erose said:


> So to summarize if archers such as Levi Morgan or Jesse Broadwater or Paige Gore, to name just a few, picked up an OR when they were kids and applied the same dedication and drive that has made them great Compound shooters, there is no doubt in my mind, that we would be looking at them in the same light as we now do with Brady.
> Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


There is a wrong perception at present about what a top compound archer is. Not enough arrows to judge people in a given tournament, but for instance Antalya is giving some indication. 700 means the 28th place for men, 706 the 10th place and top 3 are at 713. 
For women, 690 is the 22nd place, 696 the 11th, top 3 > 700 .


If we add up how many archers men + women are in the top 28+ top 22, compared to how many were comepting, we have:

1) Korea 4 + 4 (8 competing) 
2) France 4+1 (5 competing)
3) USA 4+1 (8 competing) 
4) South Africa, Netherland, Turkey, Italy , others ... with 3 in total. 

For sure, there is number of men compound in USA outside those in Antalya that can shoot > 700 if they compete, but may be one or two only that can shoot > 710. And, frankly, not so many women that can reach even 690 level. No meaning if you are not among those few even to try, as world cup money prizes or contingency money needs very very high level of competitiveness. 

If present top compound shooters starded in childhood with recurve, could they become top recurve shooters? Answer most probably is no, at least in Europe, as here majority of them are coming from some may be very early unpleasent recurve experience. 

There is (easy?) money to win in compound in USA? If it exists, we wil see more and more compoudn shooters trying for it in the next years. Up to now we have to remember Mike Shloesser and Sergio Pagni winners in Las Vegas, Seb Peineu finalist, Federico Pagnoni in the top 8 this year, Stephen Hansen missing Shaghai to compete in USA ... More to come, very rapidly... 

As said, the world is changing ....


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

i have no idea what ranking archery has in the hierarchy of sports being supported by the US Olympic Committee/USArchery but i can see from the international events where the USA sends teams that the other country's are slowly but surely eroding whatever is left of the USA's previous overwhelming dominance in compound..


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

Medals summary form Antalya World cup:

http://www.ianseo.net/TourData/2018/3118/MEDSTD.pdf


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

Vittorio said:


> Medals summary form Antalya World cup:
> 
> http://www.ianseo.net/TourData/2018/3118/MEDSTD.pdf


.....it's confirmed!!

no country can approach South Korea's current dominance in archery---so what else is new??


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## monzerismael (May 1, 2018)

Korean archers are the best because its their profission ,they work full time duty practicing every day ,many other pro archers only prepare for competition before season which seem not enough for perfection.


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## DarkMuppet (Oct 23, 2013)

Here's the results of the big Presidents Tournament from this last weekend...

https://www.archery.or.kr/archer/ga...04&gmYear=2018&gmMth=AR001&mixYn=One&initGb=Y

First drop down menu is senior, university, high school. 

Second drop down is male and female. 

Notice how far down the lists you have to go before you don't see 1300 listed anymore... 


A high school student has broke the world 30m record with a 360 (27x count) 

At the beginning of the month, a few of you may have already seen a 12 year old do a 360 (23x count) at 30m....

If you think the rest of the world has problems now.... 😉


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## limbwalker (Sep 26, 2003)

erose said:


> I disagree. America has those elite archers in bulk. The problem is they shoot compound, and they are not wasting their time trying to earn a spot on the USAT, because the money is in 3D.
> 
> We could produce even more elite archers if (and this is a big if) more than just one or two OR archers could make a living shooting.
> 
> ...


Correct on these points.

I just had a conversation yesterday about how the best athletes in the U.S. have too many better choices, and that is why archery in this country gets what we get. It's not rocket science to figure this out. Archery is a casualty of the abundance we have in American sports, plain and simple.

If I had the talent for golf that I discovered for archery, does anyone honestly think I would have given up a career in golf to shoot archery? LOL


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## Jim C (Oct 15, 2002)

jmvargas said:


> another related question if i may..just when did the USA lose their grip here?...and why?


 how many sports does the USA dominate or consistently produces top athletes in events that are practiced world wide?

Lets see

Basketball
Tennis
Golf
Track and Field
Swimming
Volleyball
gymnastics
women's soccer

now where do those sports rank in terms of international popularity from say a fan standpoint? the only two other olympic level sports that have huge fan bases that the USA does not rank in the top fifth is men's soccer and table tennis. 

its a question of priorities. Archery is considered a "soft sport" that some nations can dominate if they make it a main priority. Korea is never going to compete with the USA in sports that demand massive levels of pure athletic talent like track or basketball-they just don't have the number of 6-9+ athletes with 35" vertical jumps or men who can run sub 45 seconds in the 400M or sub 10 in the 100. 

If the US Public cared as much about archery as it does basketball, golf or football I suspect the USA would be dominating again. Remember, many of our best athletes are concentrated in a few huge television revenue sports like football and golf..Think about those top golfers as archers. Nerves? concentration? Golf is the greatest choke sport ever invented. Physical talent? I remember an Olympic Decathlon Champion noting that "The NFL is full of guys who could probably beat him if they trained in his event" and Brian Shiner-Coach of the Olympic Gold winning 2010 Bobsled team (who was a D-3 football star recruited to bobsled after failing to get a pro contract for football) said the same thing


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## limbwalker (Sep 26, 2003)

Jim, I watch a lot of PGA and LPGA tour golf. Nearly every week, I wonder how many of them would just crush it as archers, with their total ability to focus and consistently repeat their shot under pressure. 

It's no secret to me why someone like Thomas Stanwood can practice part time and beat nearly every other guy in the U.S. Anyone that good at golf is going to find archery very easy by comparison. The PGA tour(s) are full of guys and gals that within a year could beat just about all our current archers. I'm convinced of that.


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## lcaillo (Jan 5, 2014)

I have played most sports and studied sport science from both the mechanical and psychological perspectives for decades. Golf is probably the hardest game to master of any I have tried. 

I suspect that you are correct. I would bet that many golfers would be very good at field archer and unmarked distances. 

As for the original question, I am not really interested in the country that will dominate. Archery is an individual sport and the most interesting thing to me is the journey of the outlier with a passion, wherever they come from. And as an aging archer myself, i am more interested in the competition of the aging against time...


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

lcaillo said:


> I have played most sports and studied sport science from both the mechanical and psychological perspectives for decades. Golf is probably the hardest game to master of any I have tried.
> 
> I suspect that you are correct. I would bet that many golfers would be very good at field archer and unmarked distances.
> 
> As for the original question, I am not really interested in the country that will dominate. Archery is an individual sport and the most interesting thing to me is the journey of the outlier with a passion, wherever they come from. And as an aging archer myself, i am more interested in the competition of the aging against time...


Amateur/weekend/hobbiest golfers have to be, out of necessity, good at judging distances. But I doubt any of the golfers on TV have hit a shot from an 'unknown' distance in years. The caddies walk every inch of the course before the tournaments, and take/have copious notes on yardages from every bush and tree on the course. But what a great treat it would be to televise a foursome of famous golfers playing a course without any prior knowledge of the course, or yardages, using nothing but the scorecard distance listings and their eagle eyes.

Another thing that would be fun to watch is the adjustment period for golfers coming from a pristine audio environment where it's "hush hush" so they can concentrate and prepare themselves mentally for the shot, and going into an environment with talking and laughing and movement in your peripheral vision, and God Forbid 'clickers clicking' (a camera click while a golfer is setting up to tee off is cause for dramatic histrionics and pacing by the golfer). 

My 'pool' of choice wouldn't be golfers. I'd go fishing for former accomplished baseball pitchers.


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## Jim C (Oct 15, 2002)

limbwalker said:


> Jim, I watch a lot of PGA and LPGA tour golf. Nearly every week, I wonder how many of them would just crush it as archers, with their total ability to focus and consistently repeat their shot under pressure.
> 
> It's no secret to me why someone like Thomas Stanwood can practice part time and beat nearly every other guy in the U.S. Anyone that good at golf is going to find archery very easy by comparison. The PGA tour(s) are full of guys and gals that within a year could beat just about all our current archers. I'm convinced of that.


yeah I agree with that. if you could get 250K for finishing tenth at the SO Cal,maybe those athletes will take up archery


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

lksseven said:


> Amateur/weekend/hobbiest golfers have to be, out of necessity, good at judging distances. But I doubt any of the golfers on TV have hit a shot from an 'unknown' distance in years. The caddies walk every inch of the course before the tournaments, and take/have copious notes on yardages from every bush and tree on the course. But what a great treat it would be to televise a foursome of famous golfers playing a course without any prior knowledge of the course, or yardages, using nothing but the scorecard distance listings and their eagle eyes.
> 
> Another thing that would be fun to watch is the adjustment period for golfers coming from a pristine audio environment where it's "hush hush" so they can concentrate and prepare themselves mentally for the shot, and going into an environment with talking and laughing and movement in your peripheral vision, and God Forbid 'clickers clicking' (a camera click while a golfer is setting up to tee off is cause for dramatic histrionics and pacing by the golfer).
> 
> My 'pool' of choice wouldn't be golfers. I'd go fishing for former accomplished baseball pitchers.


i have played golf seriously for 60 years and dabbled in archery just as long but seriously only in the last 15 years..

...i reached just a notch below national level--NCAA individual champion in 1963 plus qualified in a few of our National Amateurs- in golf but only moderate success in archery as i was already in my 50s--high 1100s Fita and 270s indoor--when i started to get serious with it.

in any case the transition from golf to archery is made easier because both sports follow the discipline of "one shot at a time" plus the art of repetition..

....and there have been numerous instances of top golfers playing a golf course sight unseen and scoring well under par and even breaking the course records.. 

and i would still choose top golfers over top baseball players to excel in archery if and when they make the transition..

BTW: i took a 3-year hiatus from golf when i decided to take up archery seriously starting in 2003..


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## limbwalker (Sep 26, 2003)

> BTW: i took a 3-year hiatus from golf when i decided to take up archery seriously starting in 2003..


Nearly the same here (as you well know). I was a 4 handicap when I took up Olympic recurve archery. Archery is infinitely more simple to practice and therefore to master. The mental game, I'd say, are very similar.


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

You will know the sport is making it here when the sponsors for either "little league" archery or the big events or competitors become general public sponsors as opposed to archery companies or ranges. You look at Korea and the teams are sponsored by the chaebols. You look at WA and the world cup is Hyundai. As long as it's the niche athletes paying niche archery companies for stuff, and then the niche archery companies do modest sponsoring arrangements, inherently limiting, basically the sport cycling around the same dollars.

And part of that is TV exposure. And formats that work on TV. To me the people who want to stay with the most hyperserious formats to ensure the best win in the most grueling of untelevisable contests are basically driving this straight towards perpetual amateurism. 15 arrow contests are probably a truer sporting contest more likely to turn up the higher seed at the end. It's also unwatchable. I can't watch WA compound world cup on TV......


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## Maggiemaebe (Jan 10, 2017)

Azzurri said:


> You will know the sport is making it here when the sponsors for either "little league" archery or the big events or competitors become general public sponsors as opposed to archery companies or ranges. You look at Korea and the teams are sponsored by the chaebols. You look at WA and the world cup is Hyundai. As long as it's the niche athletes paying niche archery companies for stuff, and then the niche archery companies do modest sponsoring arrangements, inherently limiting, basically the sport cycling around the same dollars.
> 
> And part of that is TV exposure. And formats that work on TV. To me the people who want to stay with the most hyperserious formats to ensure the best win in the most grueling of untelevisable contests are basically driving this straight towards perpetual amateurism. 15 arrow contests are probably a truer sporting contest more likely to turn up the higher seed at the end. It's also unwatchable. I can't watch WA compound world cup on TV......


This is likely a similar situation as to where/how curling wound up on tv in Canada...Tim Horton's picked it up as a Canadian marketing strategy - they pumped tons of money into it and voila we now have the Briar and other tournaments sponsored.

To me, if archery were just match play, it would be relatively easy to televise (aka would attract advertising dollars) as it has tension, close shots, big misses - essentially all the high stakes stuff that grabs an audience's attention! All of the stuff that makes curling big on tv. The only down side with archery is we're also stuck with the qualifying rounds that are really tough to televise unless you just show the top seeded players or something. That's about the only idea I have on how to solve the dilemma.


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

The thread has now totally diverged from subject ...


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## Azzurri (Mar 10, 2014)

Maggiemaebe said:


> This is likely a similar situation as to where/how curling wound up on tv in Canada...Tim Horton's picked it up as a Canadian marketing strategy - they pumped tons of money into it and voila we now have the Briar and other tournaments sponsored.
> 
> To me, if archery were just match play, it would be relatively easy to televise (aka would attract advertising dollars) as it has tension, close shots, big misses - essentially all the high stakes stuff that grabs an audience's attention! All of the stuff that makes curling big on tv. The only down side with archery is we're also stuck with the qualifying rounds that are really tough to televise unless you just show the top seeded players or something. That's about the only idea I have on how to solve the dilemma.


Agree on the first part. Which is semi relevant to topic because I think the USA has the population and coaching where what it needs is interest to pick up and sponsor take off. I think what sets Korea apart is priority and sponsorship. If the sport got more professional we'd close the gap just based on sheer population. But if it's an amateur thing here, it does the opposite, we winnow down the amount of people willing to stick with it and do the requisite level of training, and then they're not funded enough to make it easy.

Second part, if there are enough knockout rounds and generally speaking the name brand archers survive qualifying, I don't know if the viewer will be that fussy that they don't watch qualifying. We kind of need it so that seeding is objective and present tense as opposed to past tense and based on a prior ranking. As long as qualifying seeds but doesn't carry over, I don't think the fans will be fussy that it's too unwatchable to air. [If you want to see what stupidity carrying over qualifying can do, check out the travesty on female cadet recurve for youth Olympics. I once was on a league team with the girl, and she was better in basically every trials metric but qualifying score, almost ran the table on H2H, and got beat on the silly points system. That to me is what happens if we let qualifying continue to reverberate into the subsequent resolution of the competition. Ideally we'd have something we could show but for now I am happy with off camera and mostly meaningless other than seeding.]

I think that if you are televising medal rounds at knockouts plus nationals' matches, that's about the casual fan's capacity to start with. Roughly what they do for WA on Olympic channel. And then we're covered by streaming.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

there are a few proven ways to popularise a heretofore not so popular sport:

1. spend a lot of money to market the sport--ie--media exposure.
2. get well-known personalities to play and endorse it.
3. win many medals/awards for it in international competitions.
4. have a competent and motivated organisation behind it.

and yes Vittorio...this thread has taken a different turn---but that's fine with me.


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## Jim C (Oct 15, 2002)

Vittorio said:


> The thread has now totally diverged from subject ...


true but we look to you to get it back on track. BTW Got Liz's GQ shooting really well


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

Salt Lake World Cup ---> https://info.ianseo.net/?tourid=390

No Korea, Spain, Ukraina, Great Britain. Very challenging windy conditions. 
Italy is a bit in trouble with compound, too many using hinge releases... 
For recurve, it should be understood that there are 2 national teams competing this week. One is in Salt Lake for the world cup, with Nespoli, Frangilli, Morello, Landi, Tomasi e C. Mandia, and nother one iin Tarragona in Spain for the Mediterranean Games , with Galiazzo, Pasqualucci, Tonelli, Andreoli, Boari and Giaccheri. And in same weekend we have also the Italian Field championships with Max Mandia is competing there for one spot in WC Field team. Last, Andreoli and Giaccheri, still Junior, will fly from Tarragona to Patras in Greece on the 25th to participate to the European Youth championships, were Italy is sending full 24 (12 Junior and 12 Cadets) member team.
May be by results we are not at the top, but by ambition and numbers we surely are just behind Korea.


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

Vittorio said:


> Salt Lake World Cup ---> https://info.ianseo.net/?tourid=390
> 
> No Korea, Spain, Ukraina, Great Britain. Very challenging windy conditions.
> Italy is a bit in trouble with compound, too many using hinge releases...
> ...


Vittorio, by "Italy is sending full 24 member team", do you mean that all 24 archers (12 Junior and 12 Cadets) are being fully funded by Italy for all their expenses?


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

lksseven said:


> Vittorio, by "Italy is sending full 24 member team", do you mean that all 24 archers (12 Junior and 12 Cadets) are being fully funded by Italy for all their expenses?


Yes they are.

In Italy all national teams, including Field and 3D, Recurve, Bare Bow, Compound, Istinctive and Long bow, are fully funded by Italian Federation when attending to official international competitions. Only in the very few cases were Federation decides not to attend to a specific event, archers are allowed to participate at their own expense and only if they are members of the national team of that year. 

Same happens for France and some other countries.


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

Have a look to registered archers in Patras. Most proabably >95% of them are fully funded by their national federations or their Olympic committees, as it is also a YOG qualifier tournament. 

https://info.ianseo.net/?tourid=391


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

Vittorio said:


> May be by results we are not at the top, but by ambition and numbers we surely are just behind Korea.


With all due respect, Vittorio, I have to disagree with your last statement. Ambition is not something that we can easily measure, and I would argue that anyone that is competing at the World Cup level is at a comparable level of ambition in the sport. I'd further argue that if anyone has more ambition, it would be those athletes from developing countries, since they usually ahve to not only train in detrimental conditions, but also fund their own travels and expenses. So I can't agree that Italian archers are particularly more ambitious than any other given country.

In terms of numbers, i also cannot find any decent evidence. The fact that Italy has full teams speaks more of the amount the government is willing or able to spend on the sport, so using that as a matric is an unfair comparison to countries where archery is less popular, there are other sports taking more funding, or there is simply no money to go around. Given that this covers most countries in the world, it's hardly a useful metric.

What we're really trying to compare here is who has the machinery in place to continuously develop world-class archers in the same way the Koreans do. The most logical metric for this is to grab a set score, say the 630 required for Olympic male qualification, and figuring out the amount of archers per capita that can break that figure. And in that regard, Korea blows past any country for which I can find numbers.

I actually spent way more time than I should have getting numbers for this. I went through the list of the top 20 countries, and tried to find how many male Senior Olympic class shooters have ranking scores of over 630 in each country. Unfortunately, I don't speak most of the languages, and some don't seem to maintain a ranking at all. The following four countries keep detailed and accessible data on their archers scores:

France: 0.785 per million people
Italy: 0.364 per million people
USA: 0.074 per million people
Canada: 0.243 per million people

For the following countries, I did the next best thing and grabbed a recent tournament, and used that to estimate the number of shooters that break 630. This is only a lower bound, and a bad one at that, since it could have been bad weather, or an archer may not have been present:

South Korea: 1.829 per million (based on the recently posted tournament)
Japan: 0.671 per millio (59th All Japan Target Archery Championship, 2017-04-16)
Netherlands: 0.756 per million (Lowlands Shootout 2018 - Stage 2, 2018-05-05)
Germany: 0.254 per million (Deutsche Meisterschaft 2017, 2017-08-25)
Mexico: 0.129 per million (XLV Campeonato Nacional de Exteriores 2018, 2018-01-22)

Still, even from this incomplete data, it is clear that Korea leads in this metric by a wide margin. To make matters worse, for most of these countries it is clear that the tournaments used here are open to the public, since some of the bottom scores are very low. But all the Korean tournaments are already very restricted, and not all archers go to all national tournaments. So while this choice of tournament may be quite representative for several of these countries, it is quite clear that it is only a rough lower bound for Korea.

Of course, this is limited only to male recurve data. I would be very surprised if the data was much different for female data, but for compounds it will most certainly not be the same. I would welcome any further thoughts on this data, but to me it certainly seems informative. The USA's number in particular was quite unexpected, too, but it mostly comes from the fact that the USA is 10 times bigger than most of the other countries. I'm sure China or India would also be abnormally low, but I cannot find decent data for either.


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## TER (Jul 5, 2003)

PregnantGuppy, I think you've misunderstood what Vittorio said. He's not saying individual International level Italian archers are more ambitious than individual International level archers from other countries. He's saying Italy as a country (which includes it's people and it's government) is very nearly as ambitious as Korea in terms of making the effort to send many competitive archers to international competitions. The funding from the Italian government is a part of the effort being made, not an independent, unrelated bit of luck.


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## limbwalker (Sep 26, 2003)

TER said:


> PregnantGuppy, I think you've misunderstood what Vittorio said. He's not saying individual International level Italian archers are more ambitious than individual International level archers from other countries. He's saying Italy as a country (which includes it's people and it's government) is very nearly as ambitious as Korea in terms of making the effort to send many competitive archers to international competitions. The funding from the Italian government is a part of the effort being made, not an independent, unrelated bit of luck.


I would agree with that.

It's not by coincidence that Italy continues to be a force to be reckoned with in this sport, year after year after year.


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

TER said:


> PregnantGuppy, I think you've misunderstood what Vittorio said. He's not saying individual International level Italian archers are more ambitious than individual International level archers from other countries. He's saying Italy as a country (which includes it's people and it's government) is very nearly as ambitious as Korea in terms of making the effort to send many competitive archers to international competitions. The funding from the Italian government is a part of the effort being made, not an independent, unrelated bit of luck.


Exactly, nation ambitions, and money available is part of it, as individuals can't do anything in this game. 

And , I'm curious to know from were the numbers of rankings from different nations are coming from. I can find easily Italy and France, only, and numbers are:

January 1 to today, rankings on 70 mt recurve o> 630 points are:
Italy
29 men
7 women
On 60.6 millions populations, it means 0.59 per million
On 20K aprrox. registered archers it means 1.80 /000 of registrred archers.

France: 
64 men
16 women
On 66.9 millions population it means 1,19 per million 
On 70K approx. registered archers, it means 1.14 /000 of registerd archers

If these numbers have any meaning at all ... of course.


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## jmvargas (Oct 21, 2004)

Vittorio said:


> Yes they are.
> 
> In Italy all national teams, including Field and 3D, Recurve, Bare Bow, Compound, Istinctive and Long bow, are fully funded by Italian Federation when attending to official international competitions. Only in the very few cases were Federation decides not to attend to a specific event, archers are allowed to participate at their own expense and only if they are members of the national team of that year.
> 
> Same happens for France and some other countries.



...and this is what it should ideally be...

in our case due to a limited budget we have to identify in advance the tournaments we feel are worth entering and only those would be funded..

also..is the tournament in Patras limited to European countries only?


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## Vittorio (Jul 17, 2003)

jmvargas said:


> ...and this is what it should ideally be...
> 
> in our case due to a limited budget we have to identify in advance the tournaments we feel are worth entering and only those would be funded..
> 
> also..is the tournament in Patras limited to European countries only?


Yes, Patras is the European Youth Championship and Continental Youth Olympic Games qualifier, so participation is limited to European countries. Yes, Israel is included in Europe by World Archery.


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

TER said:


> PregnantGuppy, I think you've misunderstood what Vittorio said. He's not saying individual International level Italian archers are more ambitious than individual International level archers from other countries. He's saying Italy as a country (which includes it's people and it's government) is very nearly as ambitious as Korea in terms of making the effort to send many competitive archers to international competitions. The funding from the Italian government is a part of the effort being made, not an independent, unrelated bit of luck.


Unless I am also misunderstainding your post, then i didn't misunderstand at all. Money is not a measure of ambition. I dare you to watch the documentary on Deepika Kumari and tell me that there's less passion there than in other countries, despite the fact that the Indian goverment provides nearly no money for their athletes in comparison to more developed countries like Italy, USA, etc. Or look at the Mexican team, which has regularly been forced to pay their World Cup lodgings out of pocket because their government is unable to provide money. All that you can demonstrate by showing that your country is more willing to fund a team is that the right people happened to be looking at the sport and the country has enough wealth to actually sponsor them, and not much more.

Which again, does not mean I am saying Italy is not a great source of athletes. It's just that it seems rather disingenious to use this as a metric to say their archers are more passionate or ambitious than those in other countries. Once again, everyone that has actually made it to the World Cup stage is probably at a level of ambition that is close enough that comparing it is yields no interesting information.



> I'm curious to know from were the numbers of rankings from different nations are coming from


I tried to use the numbers from the ranking site. I'm familiar with latin languages, so I was able to somewhat navigate the Italian archery association website, and I found a page listing ranking scores for their athletes. It lets me choose their top X scores, so I chose the top score and counted the number of athletes who shot above 630 in the year so far. Note that our numbers differ because I only counted males; female qualifying scores are 600, so that would require a different count. Our number does seem to differ for France, but even with your numbers they barely get close to 1 archer per million, whereas Korea almost breaks 2 archers per million at a single tournament, not using overall rankings for the year.

Also, I don't find number of registered archers to be a good metric because different countries handle membership differently. For example, Canada has about the same membership in its national association as the USA, despite being 10 times smaller, but that is because in Canada provincial meberships automatically grant you national memberships, which is not true in the USA.



> If these numbers have any meaning at all ... of course.


That is indeed an interesting debate  I'm not claiming them to be perfect by any means. It's just an interesting figure that I believe can help visualize what the thread was originally asking. It does have a lot of other shortcomings, though, but most I cannot solve because it would take me too much time. Some include:

- Really good countries (namely Korea) are underrepresented, since archers that can only shoot 630 don't actually shoot at all, because they're not good enough
- If we're trying to see who has the better system to develop archers, we should probably be looking at Junior categories instead. It's significantly harder to find good data for these categories, though
- Of course, ladies are not represented in this system, and it would be interesting to see which countries have a stronger female team compared to their male team, and how the data represents that
- It is probably underrepresenting large countries, just like how the USA came out surprisingly short in this example, probably because of the niche nature of the sport

I'd love to be able to go more in-depth, but as it is gathering that data took too much time already. Maybe when I don't have as much work I can try to gather more accurate data; I've always been curious to try to do some more statistics on archery, since there doesn't seem to be a lot of people doing that.


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## TER (Jul 5, 2003)

TER said:


> PregnantGuppy, I think you've misunderstood what Vittorio said. *He's not saying individual International level Italian archers are more ambitious than individual International level archers from other countries. He's saying Italy as a country (which includes it's people and it's government) is very nearly as ambitious as Korea in terms of making the effort to send many competitive archers to international competitions. *The funding from the Italian government is a part of the effort being made, not an independent, unrelated bit of luck.


Yes, you misunderstood my post.


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## lksseven (Mar 21, 2010)

PregnantGuppy said:


> Unless I am also misunderstainding your post, then i didn't misunderstand at all. Money is not a measure of ambition. I dare you to watch the documentary on Deepika Kumari and tell me that there's less passion there than in other countries, despite the fact that the Indian goverment provides nearly no money for their athletes in comparison to more developed countries like Italy, USA, etc. Or look at the Mexican team, which has regularly been forced to pay their World Cup lodgings out of pocket because their government is unable to provide money. All that you can demonstrate by showing that your country is more willing to fund a team is that the right people happened to be looking at the sport and the country has enough wealth to actually sponsor them, and not much more.
> 
> Which again, does not mean I am saying Italy is not a great source of athletes. It's just that it seems rather disingenious to use this as a metric to say their archers are more passionate or ambitious than those in other countries. Once again, everyone that has actually made it to the World Cup stage is probably at a level of ambition that is close enough that comparing it is yields no interesting information.
> 
> ...


TER's post was plainly communicated, and Vittorio confirmed TER's post as accurately interpreting his comment about national (organizationally, not individually) ambition/commitment ... a 'national stance' doesn't void individual exception. All of the countries mentioned have the raw cash to fund a dozen or two dozen archers to travel/compete in a handful of tournaments - some governments choose to spend some of their money that way, and some governments choose not to. Seems perfectly clear to me.


Originally Posted by TER View Post
PregnantGuppy, I think you've misunderstood what Vittorio said. He's not saying individual International level Italian archers are more ambitious than individual International level archers from other countries. He's saying Italy as a country (which includes it's people and it's government) is very nearly as ambitious as Korea in terms of making the effort to send many competitive archers to international competitions. The funding from the Italian government is a part of the effort being made, not an independent, unrelated bit of luck.

Vittorio's response: 
Exactly, nation ambitions, and money available is part of it, as individuals can't do anything in this game.


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## PregnantGuppy (Jan 15, 2011)

TER said:


> Yes, you misunderstood my post.


I did, indeed. I should probably stop replying after midnight, but unfortunately that's about the only time when I can actually spend time here 

However, I have a hard time comparing a government's ambition in sports to an individual's ambition in any favourable way. We often associate an individual's ambition with passion for the sport, sportsmanship, and other such (perhaps overly romanticized) values. But when a government has Olympic ambitions, it's often results-oriented, with little actual passion for the sport. Or maybe I've just become cynical after having experienced how much some countries' archery organizations have to beg for money. I would love it if that were not the case, of course.

Now that I think of it, though, there are some situations in which I can definitely say that a country as a whole has passion for a sport. But in this case I'm thinking of things like soccer in most of Latin America, or hockey in Canada, or other sports that are so massive that they define part of the culture. Archery is way too niche even in South Korea to have that kind of pull, but I would certainly love it if there was a country with such passion for archery.


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