One year on: Open letter from the World Archery President to the members
One year after his election at the 2025 World Archery Congress in Gwangju, President Greg Easton reflects on the federation’s progress over the past 12 months and looks ahead to the year to come.
Dear friends and colleagues,
I am writing having just returned from Saltillo (Mexico), where the Executive Board gathered last week for the Hyundai Archery World Cup Final. Holding a Board meeting at one of our own events is new for us. I believe it is also the right instinct: we should meet where our sport already is, among the athletes and organisers we serve. My thanks to Gabriel Ramos and to World Archery Mexico for welcoming us so generously, and for staging a World Cup Final the whole sport can be proud of.
One year ago, at the 56th Congress in Gwangju, you placed the responsibility of leading World Archery in my hands. I want to tell you plainly what my team and I have done in that first year.
Every archer knows the shot sequence
Stance. Setup. The draw. Anchor. Only then, the release.
None of the first four steps sends an arrow anywhere. They are quiet, unglamorous and entirely decisive. No archer ever saved a shot by hurrying them – and none of us can hold a poor anchor and expect the arrow to land.
The past twelve months have been our stance, our setup and our draw. We also did something harder than working on form: we rebuilt the bow itself while we were learning to shoot it again.
What we rebuilt
Last October, we said goodbye to a long-serving Secretary General, and three other colleagues have since moved on. Rather than fill one job in the same shape, we divided it – Juan Carlos Holgado as Executive Director, Raul Calin as Secretary General – and rebuilt the responsibilities beneath them. We created a Development and Education department that did not exist before. We brought new management to the World Archery Excellence Centre.
That is a great deal of change in a short time, and I will not pretend it was effortless. But the organisation that came through it is better arranged for the work you need it to do. The part I am most pleased about is harder to put in a report: our people work with one another, and with you at our events, noticeably better than they did a year ago.
What this rebuild is already producing for you
- A four-year partnership with the Korean Archery Association: Korean coaches working in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and Ecuador; thirty sets of equipment to federations that need them, beginning with Nigeria; and an international youth programme in Incheon.
- A development collaboration with the Easton Sports Development Foundation alongside it.
- Our partnership with Hyundai extended through 2028, now including para archery.
A year ago, any one of these would have landed on whichever colleague happened to be free. Now they arrive in a department built to deliver them. That is what the reorganisation was for, and you are the ones who should feel it.
Our place in the Olympic Movement
We have kept World Archery in step with the Olympic Movement on every issue this year. For Los Angeles 2028, the IOC has approved and published our qualification system.
Many of you already know that compound mixed team archery will make its Olympic debut in Los Angeles, through the OCOG inclusion process. This is a milestone for our sport, and we look forward to seeing compound archers in Los Angeles.
This year archery also entered the IOC’s full review of every sport, carried out under the new “Fit for the Future” framework. That review gives a federation the opportunity to propose a discipline that is genuinely distinct – a different venue, different athletes, different equipment. Compound indoor will now be evaluated as a possible addition to the Olympic programme for Brisbane.
I want to be clear about why compound indoor. We believe indoor offers a strong case for developing compound archery’s Olympic presence over the long term: it takes archery into an arena, in front of a crowd close enough to feel the shot, in a format built for broadcast, with athletes and equipment distinct from anything already on the programme. We are putting it forward because we are convinced it is right for the Olympic programme and right for archery.
The review is an opportunity to present that case, but no decision on inclusion has been made. Our focus now is on contributing to the IOC’s evaluation process. Our commitment to compound archery’s Olympic future extends beyond any single decision, and we will keep member associations informed as the process develops.
I have also spent time this year with the presidents of other international federations. Those conversations have been generous, candid and useful, and a good number of the ideas now in front of our Board and the administration came out of them.
How we govern ourselves
As we look ahead to what the coming years will ask of archery – from the Olympic Movement, from our partners, from our athletes – it is clear that the way we govern ourselves must keep pace. That begins with Book 1 of our rulebook, our Constitution and Procedures. Modernising it is not administrative tidying; it is the foundation that our federation rests on.
A full review of our Constitution is therefore under way. It is early, and there is nothing yet for you to read – but it is coming, and it will reach you in good time to consider properly and to contribute. The Board has also looked honestly at how it works as a Board and has identified where it can do better.
Where we stand
We are at anchor. Everything is now in a place we can repeat and trust. And as every one of you knows, nobody holds anchor indefinitely – the shot must go.
So, the year ahead is about the release: turning twelve months of rebuilding into results you can see in your own country, at your own events, with your own athletes.
Archery has remained relevant for many years because it has been willing to change – its equipment, its formats, the way it presents itself to the world. Every one of those changes was resisted by someone at the time, and every one of them made the sport better. I have asked our Board to keep that instinct alive: to keep asking what we should do differently, what we can do more simply, and what we should stop doing altogether. Even meeting in Saltillo, at one of our own competitions, is a small example of that. I would rather we keep finding such changes ourselves than wait to have them forced upon us.
If you have something you believe World Archery should be doing differently, I would like to hear it from you directly. Write to me, or to Raul or Juan Carlos – the three of us are here to listen. That invitation is not a formality.
I look forward to seeing many of you in the coming year, and all of you in Medellín for our Congress in 2027.
With my thanks and my respect,
Greg Easton
President
World Archery
