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. 😉
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.
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.)
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.
“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.
After my adventures in Shanghai, I made my way to Seoul, a city I had been itching to visit for some time. I wasn’t disappointed. There’s a lot to say about this extraordinary place, so I’m going to split this up into two parts.
Thanks to some internet contacts, I got to meet Andrew White. Andrew is a professor of English at one of Seoul’s universities and a serious archer. He was kind enough to spend some time giving me an introduction to Korean traditional archery, or gungdo, at the Surakjeong (수락정) range out in the north-east of this enormous city.
South Korea is one of the most mountainous democracies on Earth – over 70% of the country is classed as uplands or mountains. The capital Seoul is hemmed in on all sides by towering rocks that have served to shape the city’s temporal and spiritual history. All Seoul’s traditional archery ranges are elevated, perched on the slopes of the surrounding peaks, and most of them are anything but flat fields. To varyingly rugged degrees they are tied much more firmly to the natural world than Western ranges, and Surakjeong – the ‘Surak’ part refers to the local Suraksan mountain, ‘Jeong’ meaning ‘range’ – is no exception. The range is rural, wild, green and peaceful, with a channelled mountain stream burbling diagonally across the field. I am mildly startled by a four foot snake making his leisurely way back to the undergrowth, although I manage to take a photograph. I mention it and show the photo to club members, and apparently he is a familiar sight out here. This is, of course, his territory as well as ours.
Many gungdoclubhouses, or jung gahn, are built in a traditional style, featuring curved, extended wooden eaves which exactly resemble the architecture of the five great palaces of Seoul, right down to the identical colour scheme, which is said to symbolise a tree. There couldn’t be a more direct expression of the sport’s direct links to royal, dynastic and military tradition, and archers are expected to bow to the clubhouse when entering and leaving the range.
The jung gahn here holds a familiar trove of trophies and memorabilia, dusty history and old equipment. There is another open shed for bow storage and maintenance, with a few modern low-poundage recurve bows too which are sometimes used with local schools. It is not well known that FITA fields are actually very rare in Korea, despite the high-profile Olympic success. Recurve and compound target archery simply doesn’t exist as a mass-participation sport with nationwide clubs like in Europe and the Americas – although a handful of ranges accommodate both traditional and target styles.
The distance of these ranges is always 145 metres, a distance similar to that used in a Joseon Dynasty-era military exam. On these terrains the target bed is frequently elevated or lowered from the shooting line, here it is a few feet higher. Gungdo targets are approximately 2 metres by 2.5 metres, with a rubberised surface that the arrow is designed to bounce off rather than penetrate – the targets feature an electronic indicator connected to a light to indicate a hit.
There’s also no such thing as an indoor season to speak of – shooting continues year-round outdoors. In Korea’s harsh winters the line here is greenhoused and heated, and Andrew says there’s nothing quite like getting the first hit of the morning after a snowy night and seeing a grand white sheet of snow slump off the target in one go.
The only bowstyle shot here is the traditional Korean bow, a reflexed composite weapon without an arrow shelf. Beginners and casual archers use modern laminated bows and carbon / aluminium arrows familiar to Westerners, but as one moves up the levels past the fourth dan, archers must use traditional water-buffalo horn bows known as gakgung and bamboo arrows to progress further. These exquisite objects, which take years to make, are kept in a specially temperature-controlled cupboard buried into the mountainside, the natural materials requiring a great deal of care to maintain.
The bamboo arrows are also difficult to construct, requiring the sourcing of bamboo with identical length stalks as well as thickness, in order to spine correctly. Traditional arrows are fitted with pheasant feathers and numbered in various decorative ways, and all arrows are crimped with blunt bronze points.
Out on the mountain soil, long-standing members of the club are given small plots on the expanse of the range as an allotment. Andrew is raising peppers and hops for homebrew on his, next to a crop of what looks like kale. A session of archery interrupted by a spot of gardening is not at all an unusual afternoon out here – and naturally, old arrows get used to mark things out. The plots are mostly out of the line of fire to the targets. Mostly. Given the relatively high trajectories of Korean archery, apparently other ranges around the country even feature roads running between the line and the targets. Every type of land is employed, there are ranges shooting over ponds, rice paddies, tree groves, and even ocean inlets.
Andrew White.
Each end consists of five arrows – no more, no less – and the arrows are tucked inside a sash worn round the body: quivers are not normally used. The colour and markings of the belt indicate the dan level the archer has achieved – the first key stage is achieving a perfect end of five out of five, known as a mohlgi.
There are grading competitions a few times a year, and a program of local and national competitions. Members at Surakjeong have access 24/7, and there is a complicated hierarchical system in a country known for complicated hierarchical systems; archers are deferred to variously by age, dan ranking, and length of membership. Out back there is a long narrow building that serves as kitchen and mess hall, also housing the club’s leaderboard, clearly indicating the dan and other ranks of the members, and the order they were achieved in. Once you make a certain dan, you retain it for life.
Communal cooking and eating is normal, and I am kindly treated to a meal of noodles, kimchi and dureup jeon – woody shoots foraged from the local mountains by a club member and fried in batter – along with makgeolli, the milky-coloured, mildly alcoholic, utterly Korean rice beverage.
Dureup namu (두릅나무) in its raw state.
Dureup jeon (두릅전).
I was amazed by the standard of the permanent facilities, but rather more struck by the similarities, rather than the differences, between gungdo and outdoor target archery, especially as practiced in the UK. The relaxed air of a shooting afternoon, the birds louder than an arrow being released, the reciprocal arrangements (any member can usually shoot at any other range as a guest) and the social structure were very familiar. The demographics of archery club members in Korea is not entirely dissimilar to that of golf clubs – indeed, golf is apparently pretty popular among Korean archers. The different clubs around Seoul and the rest of the country differ variously in attitude, formality, snootiness, average level of ability, coaching, and the degree of drinking and socialising that goes on – again, something that will be very familiar to UK archers. 😉
Coached by Andrew, I am given a chance to shoot with a trainer bow, first on a set of practice targets out back, and then from about the halfway line of the range. A discussion of technique could fill a book; being used to recurve shooting with a tab, the thumb ring and Mongolian grip are the trickiest things to get used to, as well as the low anchor point. Still, from about 70m out, after ten or so arrows have hit the floor, I am pleased to hear a distance knocking sound and see the centre target light flash. The breeze ripples through the trees. I’m on my way.
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Enormous, heartfelt thanks to Andrew White for enabling this piece and taking the time.
You can read much more about Korean traditional archery in English at Martin Sadlon’s site (RIP) as well as the one maintained by Thomas Duvernay.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Archery in Seoul over the next couple of days.
In May 2015 I went to the first stage of the 2015 Archery World Cup to work for World Archery, reporting for the website and interviewing athletes. This is a personal account of what I got up to. You can watch the finals, read the news pieces I had a hand in, and check the results here: http://www.worldarchery.org/EVENTS/World-Cup/2015/Shanghai
Shanghai goes on and on and on. Long before you reach the actual city itself, you fly in over a flat, repetitive landscape which is entirely man made. Smallholdings, vast canals carving up tracts of land, and factories. This is the manufacturing belt. Most of the world’s consumer goods are produced within fifty miles of Shanghai. Just with what I have in my bag on the plane, it looks like I’m taking my headphones back to see their ancestral home, and my camera lens. And my MacBook. And my iPhone. Probably the chargers, possibly the pens, probably the bag fabric if not the bag. Probably at least half of my archery kit. It’s all made here.
Pudong District, Shanghai
I am driven in from Pudong airport with most of the Brazilian recurve team, an hour on the road through an immense grey sprawl. Our hotel, one of two housing the archery circus, is a 90s curiosity with a gaudy lobby maintaining a grandiose, marbled air of communist-era theatrics. The main tower goes up 42 stories, and in my room on the 39th there is a Blade Runner-esque view of the Pudong district at night. To the north is a vertical jumble that stretches to the horizon, and everywhere, everywhere they are still building, for countless miles in every direction. It makes the London development boom look like a man considering a new shed in B&Q.
The archery world cup has seen a permanent edition here in Shanghai since 2009 and will be here for at least another five years; it is now a defining part of the series. The story starts again tomorrow.
TUESDAY
Oliver Haidn, Germany’s head recurve coach.
Official practice day. Glorious sunshine. The athletes and staff are ferried from the hotels a couple of miles to the Yuanshen football stadium in a fleet of coaches, buses, minivans and taxis. Driving in central Shanghai is a furious, honking jungle where only drivers who sharpen their wits survive. It’s like driving in Rome with even more smoking. Luckily our driver has the sixth sense necessary to make a left-hand turn across six lanes of traffic with mopeds, bicycles and pedestrians flying in all directions.
Once inside, there is an entire World Archery staff and ten judges to fit out with brand new uniforms courtesy of sponsor FILA, and the media room resembles a branch of Sports Direct shortly before Saturday closing. Next door is the technical and scoring room, maintained by Matteo Pisani and his mostly Italian team. They have coffee in there. We also need to re-photograph every athlete and coach on the field for accreditation. There’s a lot of work to do.
Once in in my spiffy new uniform, my job here is to report for the World Archery website, and specifically, interviewing athletes. I work under Chris Wells, the head of communication; for the first few days, we split the work – I mostly do recurve and he mostly does compound. The days are long, and it never really stops. You end up dreaming about it.
Bernado Oliveira.
I am also taking a lot more photographs these days on my own account. Shortly before leaving I invested in a second-hand Tamron 70-300mm telephoto zoom, which is giving me better results than I expected. When there is nothing dramatic happening, getting out on the field and taking photos is a way of shaking things up – not only can dicking around with a camera be a good way of ingratiating yourself with people, it can be a generative act in itself. If you can find something interesting in the frame, it might be interesting as part of the narrative of the event too.
However, I realised a long time ago that there is no point in trying to replicate what Dean Alberga is doing; I don’t have the talent, the equipment or the extensive personal access that he has built up over the years. More to the point, I don’t have the remit – that’s his job. So I try to look for other things, shapes and lines, odd moments, and often things not at full draw. My photography is improving, although I am still amazed at Dean’s reaction time and his ability to deliver such amazing work so fast. It is by standing on the shoulders of giants that I manage to get one of my pictures used by the Korean Archery Association, and another, later in the week, by ArcheryGB.
Zahra Nemati
I am working through a jet-lagged fog for the first couple of days, and it’s difficult to concentrate. (I’m not the only one – I see archers asleep all over the field for the first couple of days). A decent night’s sleep proves elusive all week, and we all make frequent runs for energy sustaining treats. I have never worked on any team with a sweeter tooth, and the parade of hot chocolates, cream buns, ice creams, cheese cake and sugary Chinese delights that appear over the course of the tournament would make a diabetic hyperventilate. And who would have guessed that one of the Colombian compound team was a fully-qualified dentist?
WEDNESDAY
The ranking round itself. The shakedown. It’s a bit like going through the education system – it’s not necessarily going to dictate your fate in life, but it’s really likely to.
The Korean women are here. The rock stars. These people are gods. Everyone wants a photo with them; volunteers, staff, judges, coaches, other athletes, security guards. I manage to restrain myself. This time.
Kang “The Destroyer” Chae Young and Choi Misun.
Today, lucky me, I get to talk to a astonishing list of athletes. I get to talk to men called Brady, Crispin, Taylor and Reo and women called Maja, Deepika, Aida and Bo Bae. I talk to Asian Games champion Esmaili Ebadi. I talk to Brazilian wunderkind Marcus D’Almeida, who has been feeling the pressure. I talk to the extraordinary Zahra Nemati. I talk to several of Team GB, who are not having the best meet. We talk to the interesting squad from Bhutan at their first world cup.
The stadium gets floodlit after 5pm, lending proceedings an unreal air. A lot of hopes are dashed. All that work, and what to show for it? There’s a lot of frustration in this world. Over the course of the week I get to hear a mountain of bitching, several official “no comments” on the subject of coaches, well-known athletes describing other well-known athletes as “f**king shit” and “that greedy f**king bitch”, and a great deal of incredibly salacious and occasionally entirely scandalous gossip about everyone and everything in elite archery. I would love to be able to share it all with you, dear reader, but I can’t. I’ve been in bands long enough to know that what happens on tour, stays on tour. Them’s the rules. Although you could sum quite a lot of it up as: not all the scoring takes place on the field.
THURSDAY
Individual qualification. The top 8 in each discipline are byed through two rounds. In recurve, this includes seven of the eight Koreans, and the first couple of rounds, from some angles, look like a sideshow until the doors of the shark cage swing open.
Today I get to interview former Chinese national archer Zhang Juan Juan with the help of our local fixer Alex. She won individual Olympic gold at Beijing 2008, beating three Koreans back-to-back on the way. She’s good fun, clearly experienced at fielding media questions, and has the relaxed air of a sports champion who will never have to buy a drink again. (You can read this interview here).
As the competition closes up, with recurve and compound on the field at the same time, it’s hard to keep track of what is going on and Dean, Chris and myself run around furiously trying to keep up. With the big screen only cycling information every couple of minutes, you rely on other things. I mean, you can tell by the way Aida Roman walks off the field whether she’s won her match or not. As it becomes clear that there is barely a crack in the Korean recurve machine, interest and athletes drift away. I watch the carnage continue and chat to the sharp and fascinating Bernado Oliveira of the Brazilian team, who has had a great run today.
Shanghai Tower, the second tallest building in the world, phone pic out of the taxi window.
Work wise, we are having trouble with the creaking Chinese internet, which falls over every few minutes like a clattered-into-bowstand. The scores aren’t updating fast enough. We need access to the databases to get anything down, and most of us have to use a VPN to leap The Great Firewall Of China, which adds an extra layer of tedium. Matteo and the rest of his team are late every night fixing technical niggles, swearing in Italian. The Iranian squad bring us a gift of a huge sack of roasted pistachio nuts seasoned with ras-el-hanout, the shells of which soon cover every inch of the media room. Most nights we miss our hotel dinner working. There’s not enough coffee. It’s a hard life. It’s not, really. I wouldn’t have missed today for the world.
FRIDAY
Team rounds. Compared to the previous days, they don’t take long. It’s the last stage of competition before the finals, so unless you’ve made those, that’s it for the week. Those last two points. That one arrow that just hates you. Most teams at these events are booked on unchangeable flights, and have to sit around for two to four days before heading home to jobs and families. Options are pretty limited: train, sightsee cheaply, support teammates who have made the weekend finals, and always: wonder what might have been.
After the weekend’s shooting has been decided the production team heads for the finals field on the picturesque waterfront. We are all crammed into two tents by the immensely busy Huangpu river, the busiest river by traffic in the world, across the way from the Bund. Not a minute goes by without a low-in-the-water freighter carrying aggregates or a ridiculous gaudy sightseeing boat going past, and the foghorn blasts reverberate for five whole seconds back and forth across the water. The Shanghai bells punctuate things frequently. We run through a technical rehearsal in torrential rain, with some unlucky lads from the Singapore team having to stand out there and shoot in the pissing gloom.
For some reason the Korean coach has agreed to my request to interview the women’s team. I have hurriedly got a long list of questions translated into Korean on paper (thank you Jessica!), the list is a mix of philosophical and slightly more personal; we have been trying to ‘open up’ a few teams to add more depth and colour to the coverage. “Is perfectionism a positive aspect or a negative aspect?” and “When you are away at a tournament, what do you take to remind yourself of home?”. Not many archers are used to this kind of thing.
In the evening, I wait nervously in the lobby. At the appointed time Ki Bo Bae, Chang Hye Jin, Kang “The Destroyer” Chae Young, Choi Misun and Mr. Kim, one of the six Korean coaches out here, all troop down to the hotel bar, all dressed in black, eyeing me slightly suspiciously. I sit there with four of the greatest target archers in the world, and turn my recorder on. It turns out they have all read the list of questions I helpfully provided in advance and are fighting amongst themselves to answer them. Ki Bo Bae elbows me in the ribs when I ask her “What do you like to spend money on?” There is a lot of laughing and it ends up going pretty well, with a stark moment from Chang Hye Jin, who answers my question about heroes like this: “Hero? What kind of hero? Like, my own hero? God. God is my hero.”
I just got elbowed in the ribs by Ki Bo Bae. I JUST GOT ELBOWED IN THE RIBS BY KI BO BAE.
SATURDAY
Lexi Keller
Compound finals day, aka ‘Compound Saturday’. We open for business at 11am. It’s hot. The sort of muggy weather that makes nylon stick to skin. I am sat next to the local Chinese crew member responsible for the video screens, who spends most of the next two days asleep with his head on the desk. Still, I have an excellent view of the line and don’t even have to stand up to take a decent photograph of right-handers. The Swiss TV production team, who communicate in French, take up most of the room, although English is the lingua franca of everybody working. Everyone has a vital job to do. There are no spare cogs in this machine.
Maja Marcen
Last time I was doing this gig in Antalya I managed to walk in front of a TV camera whilst trying to get some dumb photo for Twitter and deservedly incurred the terrifying wrath of Marion, one of the TV producers. I decide to make sure there is absolutely no chance of doing this again and avoid the field of play entirely, so going back and forth to the production tent involves a long walk round the main stand and then chasing athletes up and down a long stretch of waterfront. There’s a lot of walking-and-talking. I must have covered about five miles a day. Also, I start interviewing athletes on camera for the Hit The Roof team, instead of just getting audio. The Korean and Japanese men are better friends than I imagined. Lee Seungyun speaks English, but doesn’t like to *ahem* talk about it. This is all very strange.
Of many highlights today, I get to speak to Dominique Genet, veteran French compound archer. A man with a face that looks as if it was carved out of granite. A man who ends up taking home a 16th world cup medal. A man who answers all my questions with an entirely Gallic, utterly disinterested shrug. He’s awesome.
Dominique Genet.
SUNDAY
Recurve Sunday brings with it a ratcheting up of everything we already had on compound Saturday: more people, noise, media, volunteers, VIPs, gladhandling, sunshine, and things to do. The crowd is such that the seats are filled an hour before kickoff and people are thoroughly annoyed at being locked out.
Ki Bo Bae sizing up the empty finals field.
As the Korean National Championships unfold, we are relying on a mix of the ever cheerful Mr. Kim and remote audio translation (thank you Jessica!) to get as much as we can out of the squad. We can barely get the Korean athletes to the media zone in time for an interview before they have to get them back on for another match – or a medal. The mens team get clipped by Japan in windy conditions, giving us our morning story. Ki Bo Bae is a big star here; her name, announced twice, gets the biggest roar of the day. The sole Chinese team to make it to the weekend, contesting the less-glamorous mixed team bronze match, unfortunately fail to medal and have to face a angry-looking local media scrum.
Unfortunately, the display of Korean dominance doesn’t make for great theatre. By the time it gets to the women’s individual final, you can sense that the energy has gone out of the crowd a little. Teammate battles are never that exciting, but the day has several other great matches to recommend it. It’s a privilege to watch this close.
There’s a bit in the rather corpulent Korean national anthem that sounds like the last verse of Once In Royal David’s City including the descant. I have now heard it enough times to be able to hum along. As the last medal and Longines watches are handed out, the media wing of the tent begins a race against time to file the stories, photos and video before the entire production is entirely torn down around our ears.
Night falls. People leave for flights. The flightcases are filled, we leave the waterfront shortly after nightfall, and go for pizza and rather more than one cocktail. The gaudy boats are passing back and forth, and the skyscrapers are glowing bright. Trade is good. Shanghai will survive without us for another year.
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There were many people I’d like to thank for this opportunity and making me feel so welcome, but especially:
Was tired of Facebook compressing all the photos, so am putting the new ones and some already seen up on here instead. Full write-up to follow when I get the time. John x
So… I’m off on a big old trip. Will be working for World Archery at the Shanghai World Cup as part of the communications team. Will be updating this blog and the Facebook page where and when I can, but most of my time will be spent working on the WA news pages. After that I’m going to Korea, with just *possibly* some archery-related stuff to do when I’m there… 🙂 Yes, I am excited!
UPDATES: I have updated the blog design with a lot of help from Dave at I Can Make You Website. If you need something building, he’s good. I went for something a bit cleaner and simpler, a bit more ‘Swiss‘. You’ll also note the awesome coloured tag buttons, and if you scroll to the bottom, try hovering over the ‘Older Posts’ and see what happens.
LOGO. Unfortunately I’ve had to retire the Rama logo, which by the way is from a fantastic book called Ramayana: Divine Loophole, which I highly recommend. One day I hope I can get the author Sanjay Patel to make me my own Rama image. Until then, right now I’m going with something very different, this more abstract, clean logo designed by Dave out of a Worcester face, which can be interpreted in a few ways. Hope you like it.
MUSIC. I’ve also added some music via Spotify. You can follow me here. I’ve seen a few ‘archery music playlists’ around, and while all opinions of popular music are horses-for-courses, they really weren’t for me. I’ve got two playlists up at the moment. The first, ‘Outdoors’, is a collection of acoustic, folk, roots, and Americana. I was trying to grab a little of the ‘magic hour’ feeling of shooting outdoors just as the sun is coming down. Sunshine & breeze. People and the outdoors. Something like that anyway. That playlist is up on the little player below.
The second playlist is a collection of more abstract, drone, ambient and contemporary classical music, much of which I have actually listened to when shooting blank boss at home – especially trying to find something non-distracting which calms the brain but keeps you alert. So both indoors, and ‘inside’. You can find that one here. Lots of interesting stuff to discover. Email me if you want more. (PS: I don’t recommend you wear headphones on the range).
I might add some more music, or more playlists. I might rotate them. I might not. Mwuh-ha-ha-ha. Anyway, as always… enjoy. John. x
