Innehållsförteckning för Issue 167 från Bow International

A big psychological and performance milestone was crossed by Great Britain’s Bryony Pitman in January, as she become world number one, albeit for a painfully brief time. This was after a long target indoor and outdoor and field season in which she hit previously unprecedented highs before ceding the title to Kathi Bauer in February. (The full story is overleaf in the news section). Great Britain’s recurve women have bounced back astonishingly well after an anonymous Olympics in Tokyo, where Bryony was the only member of the squad to make the last 16 with a calm performance that exploited opportunities. Shortly after that, we asked Tom Duggan, now the ArcheryGB Performance Director, to reply to our leader column which suggested that the British performance was looking distinctly underachieving compared to…

US Archery team member, World Record holder, and World Field Championships bronze medallist barebow archer Matt Yacca competed in the championship barebow recurve division at the Vegas Shoot this year. Taking away silver, Matt spoke to us about his experience. What does it mean to you that a shoot as big as the Vegas Shoot has a championship division for barebow? It is a start, I guess. It didn’t go as we expected. We were told that we would be shooting in the main arena. But instead, we were stuffed in the secondary arena in the basement where there’s poor lighting and no one is interested in watching. The point was to give us visibility and create a showcase. That didn’t happen. We all received an apology email a week before…

Easton was showing off its newest version of the Bowtruk, its popular touring bowcase available in three sizes. The Gen 2 version is available now – allegedly, the original Bowtruk was specced for two loads of Steve Anderson’s gear. The Bowtruk is constructed from TPU-coated nylon for extra strength and has a duffel clip for attaching a second bag to it – handy for airports. The medium-size bag is designed extra-wide for archers who like to keep their sights installed, and has 'outside-in' pocket access. It’s pretty much the daddy of semi-soft cases. Easton also had out its Carbon Legacy arrow, a nod to the historical wing of the company. When Doug Easton first began his archery company in 1922, he started out making handcrafted wood arrows and longbows one…

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The history of the 18th century is often dismissed by the modern reader as uninteresting, lacking the mystery of ancient history and the curiosity of medieval history. Others are put off by the perceived, sometimes over-simplified class divisions of the nobility, gentry and the poor. Every age has its injustices, however, and if you are an archer or have any interest in the sport, it is worth your attention to give this age a second chance; the health and popularity of our sport today springs from a few seeds planted during the second half of the 18th century. It was a period of significant change, when secular literature and scientific discovery flourished – the European Enlightenment – but also a time when people looked back with fascination to the past…

PITMAN BECOMES WORLD NO. 1… BRIEFLY Great Britain’s Bryony Pitman (pictured above) has become the first British recurve archer for over two decades to hold the number one spot in the world rankings. She ascended to the spot at the end of January 2023, rising above Olympic champion An San after a long series of good results in 2022 and 2023. Bryony’s achievement was driven by the fact that she competes equally in field and indoor competitions as well as target. The world ranking calculation was changed to include field and indoor archery competitions as well as outdoor at the end of 2022. “Getting to world number one was one of my career goals, so to say I’ve done that now is amazing,” said Bryony. “It was a great year…

Lisell Jäätma (pictured below), the world number four, added an unprecedented third Nimes title to her increasingly impressive collection of international medals at the Sud de France tournament in Nimes in January. It was the third time since 2020 that the Estonian had stood on top of the podium. “I’m really happy,” said Lisell. “I just focused on myself and did my best and it paid off.” Despite qualifying in only 11th place, Lisell beat Tanya Gellenthien and Andrea Munoz to take the gold. Previously describing herself as ‘scared’ to shoot with the top archers, 23-year-old Lisell proved confident in Nimes, scything through a full-strength women’s field. It was the biggest story of the weekend in which the venerable tournament, which remains the biggest in Europe, returned to full capacity…

OMP PHOENIX FLETCHING JIG October Mountain Products’ brand-new Phoenix fletching jig offers an incredible amount of functionality when compared to others on the market today. Constructed out of rugged diecast and machined aluminium, its superstrong magnets keep the vane clamp solidly in place while the glue sets. It’s quick and easy to adjust, with five degrees of offset adjustment, all at the turn of a knob. You can also choose from three different fletch configurations — three-fletch 120°, four-fletch 90° and four-fletch ‘X’ 75°x105° — and three clamp options — straight, right or left helical. The open design of the jig gives you easy access to both sides of the fletching, so catching those messy glue runs won’t be a problem any more. There’s even a bunch of handy cut-outs…

Welcome to the second instalment of this guide, where we are looking at the process of practical arrow-building broken down into its component parts. In this issue, we’re going to be taking a look at fitting hardware to the shafts that we explained how to prepare in the previous issue. Fitting hardware to shafts isn’t all that difficult, but it’s worth employing a good amount of concentration and good technique to ensure a clean, efficient, accurate and most of all safe job. When it comes to fitting points into shafts, we really only have three ways of fixing them. Firstly, we can glue them in with a hot-melt. Secondly, we can glue them in with a specialist impact-resistant adhesive such as Bohning Insert Iron. Thirdly, we can use the two…

Here at Bow Towers, we were excited to receive another book that tackled that trickiest of subjects: target panic. Author Jes Lysgaard is a trad archer from Denmark. While forms of target panic can strike any archer in any discipline, it is well known that target panic disproportionately affects unsighted bows, and this is the focus of the book. Lysgaard is a long-time Danish international in longbow, but here applies a background in psychology and hypnotherapy to uncover what our minds are actually doing when we are afflicted with this frustrating experience. The first thing he does is rename it as ‘the archer’s reflex’, as a more neutral and descriptive term, removing the word ‘panic’ – which is rarely a literal description of the problem. The book goes deep into…

Regular readers of the World Archery website may have come across a story towards the end of January by Jiwon Kim called “How Korea’s school system produces the best archers”. Much of it will be familiar to regular readers of Bow and elsewhere; if you need a refresher, try googling “The Secrets Of Korean Archery” to find a very long article by your editor explaining the system in detail. In among the usual list of superlatives, it detailed the training regime that was followed by Kim Je Deok, the boy wonder who won two gold medals in Tokyo in 2021 aged just 17. All Korean elite archers start young, with Je Deok first picking up a bow at the age of 10 in the third grade of the Korean elementary…

The 2009 world champion and long-time US international Reo Wilde will coach the Korean compound team in 2023. He is notably the first foreign coach to officially be part of the Korean Archery Association. The 49-year-old Wilde’s multiple international achievements include two gold medals at the World Games in 2013 and World Cup champion in 2006, although this is his first permanent coaching role. “My hope is to help build a real compound programme in Korea,” said Reo. “A great base for the future of compound archery in the country. And to win a few medals along the way.” Korea’s elite compound programme rapidly expanded after the discipline was added to the Asian Games, the second most important competition after the Olympics for the nation. The Asian Games will be…

The Lancaster Archery Classic, the second largest indoor tournament in the USA after Vegas, wrapped up at the Spooky Nook sports complex in Pennsylvania, USA. The event, which features unique targets and a unique televised finals format is notable for the prevalence of barebow archers. Over 250 male and 91 female barebow archers competed in this year’s event, which has became an unofficial ‘indoor world championship’ for the discipline, according to some. The women’s senior barebow event was won by Lina Bjorklund of Sweden, with the USA’s Matt Hudson taking the men’s gold. Videos of the finals competition are available on YouTube.…

Field and 3D archery can often be a bit of a mystery to a lot of target archers; as most of us start shooting at our local target club, we’re often not aware of this diverse and exciting form of archery until we are introduced to it by someone in the know. As a result, there are a few misconceptions surrounding this discipline, which puts off a lot of target archers from giving it a go. To start with, you don’t need different gear. The majority of field archers use the exact same equipment to compete at target archery as they do around a field range. For compound archers, balancing your sight becomes important: as field and 3D targets are at different angles, it’s important to make sure that your…

As usual, the Bow team was at ATA for a poke around the world’s biggest archery trade show. The ATA is the Archery Trade Association of America, and it’s also the given name of the trade show every year in January, kicking off the North American ‘season’ of the ATA, Lancaster and Vegas that gives the first part of the archery year its shape. Back in its spiritual home of Indianapolis, many major archery manufacturers attend the event, which remains closed to the general public. A few of the bigger names in the business, including Hoyt, Mathews and Win & Win, decided not to attend the show this year. No matter: we still went around hunting for the new, exciting and covetable. BOWHILT An interesting new product was on display…

Strength, noun: “the quality or state of being physically strong” and “the capacity of an object or substance to withstand great force or pressure”. Strength is not just one ‘thing’. Although I teach people how to be physically strong in a gym, I find that it also works in other aspects of their lives, allowing them to be mentally and emotionally stronger. Have you ever had to do something physical that is truly hard? The reward, much like a ‘runner’s high’, is a huge hit of dopamine released from the brain, making you feel good and giving you a sense of achievement. The harder the lift, the bigger the achievement and the greater the dopamine reward we feel. So it is worth pushing for those personal bests in the gym…