Samsun World Cup
The season closer in Samsun was an intriguing finish for fans of the sport
The end-of-season closer was a cracker
Samsun was an interesting choice for the World Cup final. The second major base for archery in Turkey after Antalya, it's an industrial port town on the Black Sea. With the competition held on a helipad near Bati Park, on the coast, it might not have been in the Paris league for spectacle, but the local team had done a great job and it delivered some major drama anyway. The quality, especially on the recurve side, was exceptional.
Every year, the host country gets four places for the World Cup final. No host country has ever won the World Cup final, in the 13 year history of the event. But this year, things were almost very different. Turkey won two places by right for stage winners Yesim Bostan and Mete Gazoz on top of their allocated four spots, and for the first time, looked like serious challengers.
On the compound side, after a year in which Yesim Bostan took the world number one spot, it turned out she couldn’t find enough in the tank against Korea’s So Chaewon. But Demir Elmagaacli, a previous winner in 2015, was in as a host nation place and probably not a tip for the title this year. The pressure off, he went on to dispatch Stephan Hansen and Abishek Verma to make the final.
Elmagaacli’s match against Hansen was notable for the Dane’s clear struggles with target panic at full draw. It’s not so well known quite how prevalent various forms of target panic are among elite compounders, and how many struggle with it in some form or other, even among the (mostly) supportive atmosphere at the top of the sport. Hansen had two very visible twitches at full draw with his last two arrows, producing a disastrous six and seven.
A gutshot Hansen said afterwards: ”It’s called target panic, and it’s not fun. That’s what happens, and you cannot control it and you cannot get out of it. I know everything about it as I’ve had it before. It happens to other people as well. I don’t know why. It’s dumb. It’s weird. We should be better than that. But we aren’t, apparently.” Then as a full-time professional archer who makes his living competing around the world, he went immediately back out onto the practice field afterwards with his coach to try and straighten things out.
Meanwhile, the USA’S Kris Schaff had been scything through the field with grindingly consistent shooting and a apparent total lack of self-doubt. After pushing past a lacklustre Mike Schloesser in the first round, he shot back to back 148s in windy conditions to take the title. It was a remarkably controlled performance from the American, who has attacked the European tournaments with gusto this year.
On the women’s side, as so often, it appeared
as if it was Sara Lopez’s tournament to lose. Her 2018 results showed she still apparently had the magic, even if her medical studies take up as much time as archery these days. Lopez still appeared to have no off moments, no qualms, finding a second gear against the increasingly powerful So Chaewon, and fearless against Linda Ochoa-anderson, a matchup she has now won four times in majors. Her win also means she matches Brady Ellison for total World Cup final victories, with four.
The host nation had a lot to smile about on the recurve side of things too. Yasemin Anagoz had an incredible year which saw her crowned European champion in Legnica by beating former world champion Maja Jager; she anchored the Turkish recurve team to the ladies title too. This was on top of three World Cup mixed team medals with Mete Gazoz around the circuit, as they burned through talented fields across the world.
Even so, it’s fair to say no-one expected the incredible run she made on recurve Sunday in Samsun: beating, to deafening home applause, the Olympic champion Chang Hyejin with dogged persistence. Hyejin, after starting the year in a glow of astonishing form and confidence, seems to have faltered as the months have gone on, falling further and further off the blistering pace that recurve collectively has shown this year. The Asian Games was widely seen as a disaster for Korea, admittedly only by their own near-impossible standards of locking up literally every medal available, and the Olympic champion looked perhaps the most vulnerable of all. The punishing schedule for a handful of them at big tournaments didn’t help; as Bow speculated earlier in the year, is athletes having to perform three times a day, in individual, team and mixed team competitions, just too much?
None of this should take anything away from Anagoz, who maintained enough focus and confidence in her execution to see the job through. She followed that with a similarly remarkable result against multiple World Cup finalist Deepika Kumari – who was flying solo - literally. Without a coach, after a parade of complicated politicking and dramas with the national federation, and without even her Indian compound teammates who had flown home that morning, Kumari stood on the biggest stage alone.
It was a rather sad end to the outdoor season, even if the Indian was shooting strongly, and recovered to take a bronze medal. But again, Anagoz prevailed, with remarkable consistency. In the final against Lee Eun-gyeong, she couldn’t quite find the very last gear, but still took four points off the young Korean wunderkind for another well-deserved silver.
The recent rise of the Turkish national side is not by accident; they have put serious investment in their top level athletes, to the point where Gazoz and Anagoz now live for free in a five-star hotel in Antalya, as long as they go and and practice all day, every day, and win for their country – a side of the bargain that this year, they have definitely held up.
National team coach Goktug Ergin was clear about the reason for the results. “The winning didn’t start this year. It started way back in 2013, and after five years, finally we find some results. We knew last year things were going well, and
The recent rise of the Turkish national side is not by accident; they have put serious investment into their top level athletes.
finally this year we took the medals to prove it. We started in 2013 with really young archers. Mete and Yasemin were only 14, now they are 19.” Anagoz added: “Ten hours every day: eight hours shooting and two hours in the gym. It can be long and boring, but if there is a reason why we are winning, it’s that.” There is no doubt as to the goal ahead: a medal in Tokyo – and it’s looking more possible than ever.
Hyejin got a small measure of revenge by taking the mixed team title with Kim Woojin against Anagoz and Gazoz, but it certainly was not a dominating performance – the scoreline was 5-1 in sets, but with arrow totals of 111-108. The Korean athletes, with an unfamiliar set of people in tow (for political reasons, all had brought their pro-team coaches rather than the better-known national team coaches) never quite looked themselves.
On the recurve men’s side, Taylor Worth had been forced to postpone his honeymoon after his points totals won him a free ticket to Samsun. With his new bride in tow, the perennial Australian danger man beat Mete Gazoz in his first round match, and then pushed Kim Woojin hard in the semi. This brought him to a bronze match against Brady Ellison, who he held an enviable record against outdoors, with three wins including, notoriously, dumping the American out of the individual running at London 2012. But Ellison, competing in his eighth final (with individual medals at seven of them) was in no mood to let it go, took the match to a shootoff, and prevailed to take yet another bronze medal.
The final came down to the two best Korean men of the year; the vastly experienced world number one Woojin and the young hotshot in his first major international season: Lee Woo Seok. It was the third time the matchup hd been played out this year, with Lee taking the first battle in Antalya, but Kim taking the Asian Games title and, eventually, the gong here in Samsun – his third, after wins in 2012 and 2017. As with the previous two encounters, it was a masterclass of confident, aggressive archery, on a day of quality action where a single mistake was often fatal. Mauro Nespoli lost his match with ends of 27, 29, 28, 28, and 28. High-level shooting was not enough; you needed more out here.
There was disappointment for Chinese Taipei, as none of the three women – two recurves, and one compound – that had made it to Turkey won a match. But overall, the final (and indeed, the year) has shown that there is a extremely narrow gap between the Koreans and the very best of the rest of the world in recurve.
No-one doubts that the Koreans have the best archers, the most resources, and the deepest benches in the world – but are they being optimally managed? And as we turn the corner into the Olympic qualifying season, is it just possible that the long decades of total dominance may be coming to an end?