Analysis: Should Kim Woojin have won archer of the year?

At the World Archery’s annual awards for 2024, held online last week, Matt Stutzman became the first para athlete to be named archer of the year, finishing just ahead of five-time Olympic gold medallist Kim Woojin in the vote. 

Three of Woojin’s gold medals were won at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, where he became the third athlete in history to take three golds at a Games after Lim Sihyeon and An San.

Stutzman took individual gold at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, following a silver medal all the way back in 2012. It was the culmination of an amazing career, after Matt had already announced that this Paralympics would be his last.

But was it the greater achievement? 

While the awards have been running since 2016, the archer of the year title has only been around since 2022, so there’s not so many athletes to use as a reference point. Ella Gibson, Marcus D’Almeida and now Stutzman have been recognised with the prize.

But why did Woojin not take the big prize? He took three gold medals to Stutzman’s one, at the very pinnacle of our sport. He also broke an extraordinary national record by becoming the most decorated Korean Olympian of all time – in any sport – as well as the most decorated archery Olympian of all time.

Immediately after his fifth medal in Paris – after that final – Woojin said, with a characteristically dry grin, ‘I think you can now call me the greatest of all time’. He followed up by winning the Hyundai Archery World Cup Final for the fifth time.

Surely he’d be a shoo-in for the archer of the year after that?

Well, maybe not. Woojin is expected to perform at this level and has remained at the very top (or very close to it) of the Korean international men for a decade.

His form may have been up and down – by his standards, if not the rest of the world’s – but he has been producing the results and he was the favourite. Until Paris, the only glaring omission from his trophy cabinet was the individual Olympic title.

When he arrived in form in Paris, we knew it would take someone very special to beat him – and Brady Ellison almost did.

Matt Stutzman’s story has been told many times, but his achievement in Paris perhaps deserves some more attention.

It’s a truism that most Olympians in general tend to perform best at their first Olympics. While that same truism doesn’t quite hold for Paralympians, remember Stutzman picked up a silver from the London 2012 Paralympic Games, but came up short in both Rio and Tokyo, failing to medal individually. It took dogged persistence, and multiple setbacks, to maintain his career long enough for a last shot in Paris.

Once in the arena, Stutzman survived two shoot-offs to reach the individual final at Paris 2024 and beat top seed Ai Xinliang to claim gold with a score of 149, a new Paralympic record, in front of a packed house including his family and – of all people – Hollywood star Jackie Chan.

But Stutzman’s career as the ‘Armless Archer’ has ultimately not been measured in major medals.

The irresistible, impossible story of a man without arms shooting a bow has been told over and over in news media literally all over the world; helped by Matt’s own brilliance at telling it and marketing himself. He has almost certainly created more headlines than any other tournament archer in history, and has helped sell the sport to places it might never have gone.

And at least three more ‘armless archers’ – all para athletes born without arms – have followed his path: India’s Sheetal Devi, Belgium’s Piotr Van Montagu and Mexico’s Victor Sardina Viveros. All of them were in Paris along with Matt, the man who blazed the trail.

“There’re more armless archers involved in this sport now,” Stutzman said. “You can take away all my medals, and I wouldn’t care, because that would be my medal.”

His real legacy may not be as an archer, but as an inspiration.

As he said in the documentary Rising Phoenix, about his gradual realisation that he could do everything people with arms could do – including climbing trees – he reasoned:  “I could drive a car with my feet, and outrace 90% of the people around me. A car doesn’t stereotype the driver. It doesn’t care if you have arms or not. It just wants to be driven.”

While Woojin has finally been crowned as the greatest Korean archer of all – and it’s well deserved – Stutzman has ultimately changed both the sport and the perception of what it means to be born without limbs, to refuse to accept limitations. 

For that, he should really be crowned archer of the century.