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Sebastian takes maiden title at 2025 Archery Open as France claim three medals

7 December 2025

Taoyuan City, Chinese Taipei

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France’s Victoria Sebastian took her first senior title, winning the recurve women’s competition at the 2025 Taipei Archery Open on Sunday by beating Korea’s Lee Eunah, 7-1, in the gold medal match.

”I was pretty calm, I knew I just had to play my game, so it was pretty nice,” said the 21-year-old. ”Now I have more experience, so I was very cool. I was very motivated, but cool.”

Sebastian, who also beat reigning World Archery Champion Kang Chaeyoung and youth team world gold medallist Han Sol on the way to the final, indeed stayed extremely cool, calmly delivering four ends of 29 for victory, while Lee never really found full fluency on the stage.

She also achieved the win despite an airline mishap that saw her bow arrive just thirty minutes before the start of qualification on Friday.

Sebastian will next compete in her hometown, Nimes.

“It’s the first time I’ve won a tournament,” she admitted. “I’ve been on the podium, but I’d never won a tournament, so this is something I’m very happy about.”

The host nation had something to cheer when Chinese Taipei’s Su Yu-Yang took the recurve men’s title, beating France’s Jean-Charles Valladont in a shoot-off.

The Rio 2016 Olympic medallist sent down eleven 10s from the start and looked to be cruising to victory, but then wobbled in the last two ends as Su went clean to force the shoot-off. Valladont shot first, but his nine was easily beaten by Su.

It was also Su’s maiden title but his third time on the Taipei stage; he took individual silver in 2022 and bronze in 2024.

Valladont’s silver meant all three of the travelling French contingent took a medal home, with Baptiste Addis grabbing recurve men’s bronze from Korea’s Heo Jaewoo.

Earlier, Croatia’s Amanda Mlinaric took compound women’s gold, edging out Korea’s Yu Heeyeon, 146-145. It was Mlinaric’s second title of the year after winning the European Field Championships in September.

Mike Schloesser then won compound men’s gold with an imperious finals performance of 150 to shut out Korea’s veteran Choi Yonghee, who never looked entirely comfortable on the stage.

It was a successful defence of the title the Dutchman won last year and his third title overall after winning the debut edition in 2022. It caps a strong year, in which he also took two World Cup stages (Shanghai and Madrid) and the World Games title – as well as becoming a father.

He also achieved this while suffering from jet lag, quipping: “A six-month-old handles jet lag worse than I do – the last few nights were rough.”

While the Korean contingent cleaned up in the junior categories, winning six of the eight finals, they had a disastrous senior finals day, with Korean athletes losing every match they contested.

The indoor action now swings immediately to South America, with the Rio Indoor 250 from 12-14 December.

You can rewatch live coverage of the Taipei finals with a subscription to archery+.