It’s been rumoured this was going to happen for a while, but Khatuna Lorig, of the USA recurve team has stripped off completely, in spectacular shape, for the 2015 edition of ESPN’s ‘Body’ issue. It’s accompanied by a pretty interesting interview transcription.
(I’d say the accompanying video is safe for work, but… it depends on where you work, I guess).
Picture: Yonhap News
GWANGJU, KOREA: As with last year’s Asian Games, the prospect of a near-guaranteed medal avalanche on home turf meant that the organisers and the KAA threw every resource at this competition, building a brand new oversize stadium. The home squad didn’t disappoint in the ranking and knockout rounds, and made almost every final in both recurve and compound.
But after Ki Bo Bae’s spectacular smashing of the 70m round world record on Saturday – breaking Park Sung-Hyun‘s record by four points, giving great quotes and sending the Korean media into overdrive – the rest of the shoot at the biannual University Games almost had an air of anticlimax. The home nation sending out an almost full-strength national recurve side did seem slightly bullish towards the spirit of the event, although they are all apparently studying somewhere and well within the age criteria, and the competition featured other grizzled pros like Natalia Avdeeva.
On compound finals day, Korea delivered in spades, taking four of the six golds on offer. Kim Jongho became Korea’s first Universiade triple gold medallist. In the women’s individual gold match, Toja Cerne nearly denied Song Yun Soo in a tight shootoff, but came up a few millimetres short. Russia denied the USA women top honours in a minor upset.
On a sold-out recurve day, the ever-lurking threat of Chinese Taipei was the only major challenge to the great white sharks. The men’s team unfortunately threw down too many eights to do any serious damage to the Koreans, with Lee Seungyun shooting completely clean with six tens – afterwards, he laconically stated: “I think being the last shooter brought out the best in me.” Lee followed up by burying teammate Ku Bonchan 6-0 in the men’s individual final to cap a spectacular 2015 return to form.
However, Chinese Taipei took unexpected revenge in the women’s team final, with a strong squad anchored by Tan Ya-Ting, a multiple World Cup medallist who finished above the Korean women at the top of the ranking round in Antalya this year. The women in blue took the opening set after Kang “The Destroyer” Chae-Young and Choi Misun both sent down eights. Choi leaked a seven in the third set to make it 4-2. Despite Ki Bo Bae finding a fourth ten, they split the points in the last to give Chinese Taipei the victory.
In the individual matches, Maja Jager squeaked past Mei Chen-Hsiung in a shootoff for the women’s bronze. Her second podium finish in two major events (she took silver at Baku 2015) bodes well for a serious defence of her title at the upcoming world championships. For the gold, Ki Bo Bae and Choi Misun contested their third major podium match of the year in a high-quality final that saw every arrow in five sets hit the yellow, with a perfect end from each archer. Despite Choi drilling a staggering seven tens in a row, it went down to a shootoff. Ki Bo Bae edged it out, taking a 6-5 victory to a roaring crowd and doing her bit to leave the home nation sitting proudly at the top of the medal table.
Full results are here via IANSEO: http://www.ianseo.net/Details.php?toId=538
Article about the record breaking 70m round here.
Thanks to Yonhap News for the quote.
Interesting piece from a couple of years ago about the rise of Win & Win and the archery business in general, featuring some of Team LH in action and being interviewed. Enjoy.
You all know that Win & Win make high end carbon bikes as well as bows, right? This is how:
My kind of carnival. From the 1960s and still in use at Pinner Bowmen.
Brief video from the Smithsonian channel exploring the differences between a yumi and a longbow, briefly explaining why recurves are more efficient than simpler self-bow designs.
Amongst the many things it doesn’t explain or gets wrong include why the longbow became popular despite more efficient composite designs existing contemporaneously. The reason is that it was a mass-produced weapon, much cheaper and quicker to manufacture and requiring less maintenance and care than composite Eastern bows – the Kalashnikov of its day. The classic English yew longbow of historical battles also used much higher draw weights than the 50lb weapon shown here, usually 100lb and up for long range, heavy war arrows on European battlefields, very different to short-range (and often mounted) samurai combat.
It ends with a slo-mo illustration of archer’s paradox on the longbow, without explaining why the yumi doesn’t suffer from it as much (it’s to do with twisting the bow on release, as I understand), and without explaining why it’s not an issue.
Unfortunately, archery is complicated, and traditional archery even more so – but the conventions of TV mean that things get reduced to ‘which one is better’. That’s OK. If you want more, there’s a big deep pool to dive into which you can swim in for life. 😉
(Via Archery Scrolls).
Another treat from the British Pathe archive, with some archery golf from back in 1929. Apparently they used to only play this in winter in order not to damage the turf.
There’s plenty more BP archery films in the YouTube archive, and I put several of the best ones up last year. Enjoy.
I’m going to think out loud here: I’ve often thought a form of archery played on golf courses would be a great idea and could even provide the mainstream TV breakthrough the sport is looking for – and the infrastructure and TV technical experience is already in place. Think how good the Masters at Augusta looks on a sunny late afternoon. Imagine the same thing, but with archers. People would lap that up. Wouldn’t they? 🙂
The thing in my brain would be somewhere between target, field and clout archery. I’ve watched field comps on TV, and unfortunately, because so much takes place under tree cover, it makes for a murky, what’s-going-on viewer experience. If you could make the arrows glowing bright yellow or bee-striped or whatever shows up best on the cameras, that would help. There’s technology like this which, combined with excellent commentary, would make for an informed viewer experience.
The scoring could basically be the same as golf, with a par number of ‘strokes’ per hole, with an actual ringed target as the hole providing a way to score and break ties. You could split things into ‘tee’ and ‘hole’ shots, too. One thing that target archery could badly do with as a spectator sport is an element of strategy.
Also, all archers could use a standard bow weight, or maybe a small range of weights (which would also add a strategic element). Maybe a completely standardised ‘class’, all bows set up exactly the same, you are only allowed to change the grip. Or maybe you get to choose the bow and poundage, but you can only use one bow for all ‘strokes’ – you don’t get a caddy with a rack of them. Barebows only, even? That would be something very special.
Anyway, there’s a bunch of ideas. Now all I need is a billionaire or two to get behind it, and we’re away… 🙂
Excellent work by the Win & Win AFR team at Antalya 2015, as the big man candidly explains how he aligns his shoulders on the shot. Worth a few watches if you are a recurve shooter.
More videos of Mr. Oh here and here. (AFR / Hit The Roof made several more videos in Antalya which you can watch right here.)
Great brief thinkpiece on the Canadian Olympic site with Crispin Duenas talking about the mental and physical side of the game:
http://olympic.ca/2015/05/27/the-lonely-contemplative-existence-of-the-perfectionist-archer/
You should also see Crispin’s tidy video, shot at Shanghai 2015, on fletching arrows. Best one I’ve seen, I think.
For the first part of ‘Archery in Seoul’: click here.
Mount Ingsawan.
There are a total of eight traditional Korean archery ranges in and around the capital. On an overcast, muggy day I climb up from Gyeongbokgung station, near Seoul’s greatest palace, up a winding road past a school, to HwangHakJeong (‘Yellow Crane Pavilion’) on the lower slopes of Mount Ingsawan. This commands a rocky elevation facing south over the city, looking down onto government buildings and the US Embassy. Unlike Surakjeong, here there is a clear downward slope to the targets which are, again, 145m away.
Here, the archers save on shoe leather and maximize their range time by employing a trustee to collect arrows; these are then returned in a basket via a motorized cable pulley which stretches back to the shooting line. The range is also home to a brand-new small museum-cum-gallery which contains several exhibits on the history of the range and gungdo – although there’s not a great deal of information in English up yet, either on display or on the internet. They are also planning courses in traditional bowmaking.
HwangHakJeong gallery
HwangHakJeong gallery
HwangHakJeong gallery
HwangHakJeong has royal patronage; it was built by the Emperor Gojong in 1898 in order to revive what he saw as a national tradition, to “let people enjoy archery to develop their physical strength.” The bow has been known on the Han Peninsula since prehistory, but its full flowering as a national totem came during the Joseon Dynasty: a Confucian kingdom lasting an impressive five centuries until 1897. The bow was a military weapon, and proficiency in it became a key part of the military service examination, part of a complex national series of testing and advancement which still resonates throughout the country today.
Martin Sadlon’s site explains more:
“The Joseon Dynasty adopted Neo-Confucianism as a ruling ideology to manage Korean society and maintained a political system in which the hegemony of political power was tightly grasped by the scholar officials. Archery was considered one of the basic skills (music, archery, chariot driving, writing, and arithmetic) even for scholars… it was not simply regarded as a physical skill in warfare or hunting, but as… a spiritual instrument to cultivate Confucian morality and to make people familiar with courtesy.
There is also a famous concept to view archery as a means of “assessing an archer ‘s virtuous conduct”… gradually in Korea this term appeared to be a representative view of archery as a means of cultivating and assessing virtue and courtesy of the archer himself. This is why archery, basically a martial art, is exceptionally recommended even for the literati.”
The Confucian traditions and precepts established over the various empires are still maintained in the complex hierarchies and etiquette at each range. Similar to the Hunger Games effect in the West, gungdo has experienced a national bump in interest due to a Korean fashion for historical epics such as War Of The Arrows.
HwangHakJeong
The range is in action when I visit, and I meet a couple of chaps including Kim Taesung who taught the Hairy Bikers for BBC TV last year: you can watch the segment here, starting at about 27m.
HwangHakJeong was also where the Korean Olympic archery machine began in the 1960s. The founders of the team such as Park Kyung Rae came to study the best traditional archers, whose approach to alignment and training were hugely influential on the nascent systems of coaching and biomechanics that finally bore fruit in the 1980s with the influx of corporate money that fuelled, then as now, the Korean recurve machine. It turns out that the international Olympic success draws from deeply historical roots.
Seokhojeong range, showing part of the cable pulley system
I manage to visit one more range: Seokhojeong, high on the slopes at Namsan Park, the mountain capped by the iconic Seoul Tower. This range is higher, more rugged and overgrown than the others, but has a proud history stretching back to the 17th century, and offers a chance to try archery for both Korean citizens and foreigners – there appears to be both public and private money intent on maintaining the tradition here. As well as the archery range, Namsan is crisscrossed by well-used padded hiking trails and enlivened with free outdoor gyms, part of a very public national commitment to fitness.
Seokhojeon
Seokhojeong
The long tradition and deep psychological roots of archery in Korea is expressed in Seoul public history; from artwork on the walls on the Cheonggyecheon stream, an extraordinary public waterway running through the centre of the city:
Cheonggyecheon stream
to the hanbok-clad actors in the guard-changing ceremony at the royal palaces:
There are also bow-and-arrow treasures from the past at the National Museum, from the Paleolithic to the Joseon. I didn’t get to see some other museums a little further afield, but there were a thousand other things to recommend this extraordinary city and country, and I hope to be back soon.
For more on the history of Korean traditional archery, you could read this essay by Thomas Duvernay and Moon-ok Lee.
