Colombian clean sweep ...

DarkMuppet

Member
World Archery > NEWS > News

I wish GB had a coach like this ... oh wait ... :blush:

The Colombian squad had a month-long training camp in Mexico City to prepare for the Rosario event. It was far enough way from the athletes? home in South America to give absolute privacy, concentrate only on archery and practice with top archers from another competitive nation.

It worked.


Now that's dedication, and a determination to get the results needed.

Well done Richard. :D



It all points to just how tough Rio 2016 is going to be and how much work some nations are willing to put in to get where they want to be.
 
World Archery > NEWS > News

I wish GB had a coach like this ... oh wait ... :blush:

The Colombian squad had a month-long training camp in Mexico City to prepare for the Rosario event. It was far enough way from the athletes’ home in South America to give absolute privacy, concentrate only on archery and practice with top archers from another competitive nation.

It worked.


Now that's dedication, and a determination to get the results needed.

Well done Richard. :D



It all points to just how tough Rio 2016 is going to be and how much work some nations are willing to put in to get where they want to be.
Indeed. Well done Richard! (If anyone missed it, I did an interview with him here.)

Similarly, the Indian compound team had a spectacular Asian Games in Incheon, taking a gold, a silver and two bronze medals. How did they prep? Like this:

According to coach Rajan Singh: “We went to Salt Lake City in the USA and trained with Dee Wilde (father of Reo) for 15 days. Then we came and trained in Korea in different weather conditions at Gwangju here for a month before reaching here for the Games.” said Singh, a former junior national champion. Abhishek Verma said: “I knew how to perform under pressure… We are all delighted to win the gold. We were not overawed by our opponents.”
Seems like lots of investment (they all had gleaming new Hoyt bows) and intensive training camps in the destination country is paying off at the moment.
 

Discof

New member
Interesting info DM + TIC. The combination of a sucessful international archer and coach has always appeared to me to be a must for the top positions in Archery. I know there is no sure fire success as a great archer does not always make a great coach but when it works they have the great advantage of (having been there and done that) as they say. Another interesting point is that Richard is British and who is he training!!!!!
Maybe we should look a little closer to home the next time we are looking for the top man or woman. After all, the job is now well paid and if the results are not forthcomming in the next couple of years (forget the 8yr plan) Richard as was clear from his interview is well aware of the fact that by taking what is in front of him and making small (not Wholesale) changes wonders can happen.
I wish him the very best of luck, it will be interesting to compare results with the home team in the future
 
I just found out that the Korean archers and coaches collectively received nearly 880 million won (well over half a million quid) in bonuses from Hyundai for the five golds, three silvers and one bronze they took home from the Incheon Asian Games. The going rate for a gold medal is 70 million won (about ?41,000). Not bad, although apparently a gold medal at the Olympics will get you a stipend for life.

I know they are the only archery squad in the world with that kind of 'carrot' at the end of a competition and that kind of patronage, but it is indicative of a culture. South Korea highly values its Olympic sportsmen and women and sees international achievement as a deep source of national pride, and its oligarchical system rewards that accordingly (it should be noted the Asian Games is played out against an epic backdrop of fierce historical rivalries). Here, unless you play football or cricket you ultimately get little more than a pat on the back and a 'jolly well done' from the establishment.
 

Robing Hood

New member
TIC, anyone who has a passion for their sport of archery, will look at the rewards of the Korean team with but envy I'm sure. However, one has to view those rewards in the context of the home nations sporting participation. We have recently been told that ArcheryGB has 44,000 members, but equally we are told that the club returns might not show that and following on from a recent post that 27,000 might be closer to the mark. Just how many of that *27,000* are active archers, by that I mean, serious competition archers, could only be 10% as regulars, i.e., 2,700 per week. The fact that ArcheryGB archers do from time to time compete with success on the International stage does show fortitude of the archers who put themselves forward, but to expect someone somewhere to cough up the rewards that the Korean archers get is purely pie in the sky. Now if 27,000 archers were all shooting on a regular competition basis at meaningful competitions, then maybe the rewards would be forthcoming.
 
The participation numbers in Korea are not very high. It's a small, carefully managed elite sport, rather than a mass participation pastime from which a tiny elite group is siphoned off to international duty, like in most countries. It's viewed more like polo, or track cycling, or offshore powerboat racing is over here - an expensive prestige sport, not something you can just have a go at one day and head for the Olympics in a couple of years.

I am increasingly convinced that money is the ultimate reason behind the Korean successes, rather than the training, talent identification system, culture and so on. The vast amounts of corporate money allows a deep pool of dozens of professional athletes to develop to their fullest potential, rather than the two or three per generation in every other country. That's the 'secret'.

As there is no chance of replicating that system here unless some benevolent oligarch loses his marbles, if 'we' are unhappy with the GBR international results, then perhaps 'we' need to look at what is being done in the nations who are getting traction with broadly similar participation numbers and funding: Mexico, the Netherlands, Germany maybe.

It's not a mass-participation sport in Colombia, it's an elite programme - but the money is apparently being wisely invested. If what is making the difference is the best coaches and month-long, fully-funded training camps abroad for a dozen or more people, then that money needs to come from somewhere. It's not just about how many archers are shooting at the top level.
 
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DarkMuppet

Member
Nothing will get you working harder than something like that kind of reward up for grabs. :D

I remember reading during the London Olympics the prize funds awarded by various countries for medalling, a quick Google later..


Singapore $800,000 gold
Georgia $706,000 gold
Kazakhstan $250,000 gold
Ukraine: $100,000 (gold) / $75,000 (silver) / $50,000 (bronze)
Canada: $20,000 (gold) / $15,000 (silver) / $10,000 (bronze)
Kyrgyzstan: $200,000 (gold)
Uzbekistan: $150,000 (gold)
Tajikistan: $63,000 (gold)
Italy: $182,000 (gold)
France: $65,200 (gold)
Russia: $135,000 (gold)
China: $31,400 (gold)
Germany: $19,500 (gold)
Ghana: $20,000 (gold)
Philippines: $237,000 (gold)
Australia: $20,000 (gold)
Thailand: $314,000 (gold)

Great Britain doesn't award any money, we do it for the thrill and prestige :D
 
So, TIC, where do you think the money should come from and why?
I'm not sure I can say exactly where the money should come from. I know where the money is coming from: the government, the members and a small amount from sponsorship. However, I mentioned some other possibilities in this post here:

http://www.archeryinterchange.com/f16/recurve-coach-job-going-209446/#post707951

There's a 16-year-old compound archer from Iraq called Fatimah Almashhadani who took a silver medal in the 2014 Antalya World Cup and another in the European Grand Prix. There are apparently less than 150 archers in the whole country.
In 2006 the president of the Iraqi Olympic Association, the secretary general, president of the handball association, the volleyball federation and many others, were herded into a room and gunned down together. Funnily enough, most Olympic sports programmes are still in disarray, and the handful that are moving tend to be the work of one or two determined people. There is (reconstruction) money though, enough to pay a great coach called Majid Ahmadi who was on the Iranian national team.

Her quote:

"We don’t have any outdoor fields for archery at all. We have to find quiet areas, there is just one area in the north of the country where we can do an outdoor training camp. No shade, no grass. I sometimes practise in the back garden in Baghdad but that is only ten meters...
I have to thank coach Ahmadi for everything, really. He has been selfless for me and the national team. Iraq is a dangerous country, and he has fought for Iraqi archery like a citizen."


If you can deliver results in circumstances like that, Western democracies shouldn't have any trouble, right? :)

The numbers participating en masse are not so important: international success in sport needs money, spent professionally and ruthlessly. The cult of the amateur is unfortunately over. No, I don't have the answers as to where it should come from. I wish I did.
 
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