Sole southern archer youngest World Cup contender
Hector McNeilly takes his stance, a breath, and pulls his compound bow's drawstring back towards his face. His heart rate is peaking similar to that of a multi-sport athlete, but he’s standing still.
He’s 50m from the target, his zone to hit is just 8cm wide.
“At this world level stage, you’re so close to perfection. You’re playing with minimal error,” he said.
The Nelson-based archer is the sole South Island competitor in the national Archery team to compete at the Hyundai Archery World Cup in Shanghai this month, and at just 16 years old, is the youngest member of the troupe.
In the moment, eyeing up his target, pressure is everything.
“They say it’s 90% mental,” McNeilly explains. “I think it’s more a third – a third technical, a third mental and a third physical.
“The mental mindset is the ultimate, when you’re up on the stage and you’ve got to be shooting tens (bullseye) or else you’re out.”
It’s a self-taught craft that McNeilly’s been perfecting for the last four years, after first carrying a bow and arrow around the hills while hunting with his dad growing up.
He found it “entertaining” and then started target shooting to improve his hunting accuracy.
“It just got to the stage where I actually wasn’t that bad at shooting targets and ended up shooting more targets than animals.”
McNeilly got serious about it. He holds the majority of the under-21 national records and was 5th ranked overall at the World Youth Archery Championships in Ireland last July. He was in a field of more than 100 others shooting in the under-18 men’s compound event.
“I had never experienced anything like that before, that was crazy,” McNeilly said.
It was such an “eye opener to the level of competition” out there as McNeilly was part of a national team of eight archers, while the American team in comparison had about 120 athletes.
He flies to Auckland six or seven times a year to compete, because “you’ve got to get that exposure to competition” to be able to perform on stage and learn how to control your nerves, his father Glen McNeilly said.
Because compound archery is not an Olympic sport like recurve archery is (different bow designs), the World Cup is the “pinnacle” event of McNeilly’s style.
McNeilly is part of a team of six Kiwis competing at the Hyundai Archery World Cup between April 24 and 29.
To financially support McNeilly’s self-funded journey or to follow his career, check out the Youngbucknz Youtube and Instagram pages.