It’s a fascinating test of nerve and accuracy, and one of the oldest sports in Olympic history. Archery was in fact, the first Olympic sport to allow women to participate back in the 1904 St. Louis Summer Olympics. It’s an incredible test of focus and the smallest amount of movement can mean elimination.
Olympic Archer Brady Ellison will try his hand at bringing home a gold medal for USA in the 2016 Rio Olympics
As an avid bow hunter it’s truly remarkable to watch these athletes strike 10-ring after 10-ring with a recurve bow from 77 yards away. Watching the Olympic Archers will take your appreciation for archery to whole new level.
Here’s what you need to know about archery as we head into the 2016 Summer Olympics:
- Archery has a simple but far from easy objective: to hit the bull’s eye on a target from a distance of 77 yards
- The target consists of 5 different colors and 10 different scoring rings. The 10-ring is 12.2 cm in diameter or roughly the size of a tea cup saucer.
- There’s 4 medaling events – Men’s Individual, Men’s Team, Women’s Individual, Women’s Team
- The archers have 40 seconds to fire each arrow, 20 seconds in the finals.
- Competitors with the best scores after 72 arrows go through to the next stage.
- The recurve bow is the only type of bow allowed and it can be equipped with a sight, rest and stabilization bars.
- Olympic archers practice on average 8-10 hours per day.
CLICK HERE FOR A FULL SCHEDULE OF ARCHERY EVENTS
USA Olympic Archer Brady Ellison talks about what it takes to be one of the top archers in the world.
Here’s Brady on Sports Science to further demonstrate the difficulties of repeatedly hitting the 10-Ring from 77 yards out.
“Archery is a fun sport because it’s not a one-type-fits-all. In a lot of the other sports you can go to the Olympic village and be like those are rowers, those are gymnasts, those are kayakers, and you can tell because of their build. Archery really doesn’t have that.” -Brady Ellison
