Played tennis last night - mixed doubles for the first time in 18 months or so, had a quick shower, whipped up a pizza (dressed up a frozen pizza in reality), and we got ready for the archery...
Watched a match with a Korean, who shot lights out. Three perfect scores of 30 in a row...
Pretty hard to beat that. Next up my friend Crispin, shooting against a German archer who had taken out the #1 ranked archer in qualifying from Korea. This Korean is only 17 and had already won the gold in the mixed team, and mean's team events. So the German was shooting well to take out the #1 seed, and we knew this would be a tough match. In the end, Crispin couldn't pull out the win:
The 26's in the first two sets were a killer. The 7 he shot in the second set was not a great shot - pulled the arrow through the clicker and then held onto it for a couple of seconds, before releasing. I can only assume his sight wasn't where he wanted it to be when the clicker went off, and he felt he didn't have time to let the shot down and start again (there is only 20 seconds allowed per shot). He shot better in the last 2 sets, but couldn't pull back even. So in the end Crispin came tied for 9th place overall, so that is his best Olympic performance.
He has a bronze medal from a world cup, and another from a world championships, so he can go further, but the Olympics is a special sort of pressure for the sports that have the Games as the peak event. For some sports the medal is nice, but I think many NBA players would take a pro title over a medal. The same would be true for golfers, tennis players, etc. But for a sport like archery, the Olympics is
the thing you want to win.
So the remaining question is can Korea sweep the gold medals? Well, the way the one Korean was shooting it was certainly possible, but in this case it didn't happen. Many thought the big threat to the Koreans would be Brady Ellison from the US, who has arguably won more things in the last 10 years than any other archer, except the Olympic gold. But neither the US or Korea were even competing for the medals at the end, as they were all eliminated before medals were shot for.
An archer from Taipei took out the Korean, and went on to shoot in the bronze medal match, which he lost to a Japanese archer. The gold was between an Italian and an archer from Turkey (who had taken out Ellison earlier):
Gazoz has been a strong competitor for a while now, so not a total surprise, and a good win for him certainly.
Now that swimming is coming to a close, along with some other sports, the Games kind of take a shift for me. Started watching the track events, so all I can say is go Andre!
👍
