Noziglia calls athlete of the year recognition a ‘big honour’

Italian barebow archer Cinzia Noziglia was recently announced as the runner-up in World Archery’s athlete of the year vote for 2022, only losing out on the reintroduced overall award to top-ranked British compounder Ella Gibson.

The result is particularly significant because none of the 10 trophies on the awards programme are reserved for barebows.

“It’s a really big honour,” said the 38-year-old, who became the first archer to win the World Games, the world field and the world 3D championships in the same year in 2022. “It was the best year of my career, and the product of a lot of years working hard on myself.”

Presented for the first time in a decade, the winner of overall athlete of the year award was selected solely by a panel of archery journalists. The nine other awards were split between public, executive and expert votes.

Each voter was asked to select two archers, one to receive two votes and a second to receive one.

Gibson, who won three stages of the Hyundai Archery World Cup and was runner-up at the final, accrued the most votes – with barebow archer Noziglia second.

“Barebow is increasing thanks to more visibility, and not just in number of archers but in interest, too,” said Cinzia. “It’s a beautiful bow style and has nothing less than recurve or compound, so I hope this increasing interest will continue and barebow will be recognised at a high level like recurve and compound.”

Popular in the discipline of field archery for many years, barebow was first recognised for target archery world records in 2020.

The style has experienced significant growth in popularity in recent years and, though there are currently no world-level target archery events for barebow archers, it is included in the elite ranking of the Indoor Archery World Series.