Rain and Wind in Tainan!

In the Recurve Women category, two Koreans took the first two places: Chang Hye-Jin with 658 points and Ki Bo-Bae with 657 points. Ranked 29th in the FITA World Ranking Yuan Shu-Chi (TPE) finished 3rd, followed by the two Germans Karina Winter and Anja Hitzler.
  In Compound Men, one of the potential gold medallists for this event, the French top archer Sebastien Brasseur—6th in the World Ranking—took the lead by one single point in a very exciting and tight competition. His final score was 687 points. Very close behind Jedd Greshock (USA) ranked 2nd with 686 points and 3rd was Kazuya Seki (JPN) with 684 points.   In the afternoon session rain became even heavier! The weather conditions keep changing very quickly in Tainan at this time of year. Therefore, the athletes face not only tough competition but heavy rain and strong wind too...   In Recurve Men, the local archer Wang Cheng-Pang—14th in the World—took the lead with 668 points. Second was the Spaniard Daniel Morillo with 664, who qualified just a few days ago for the Olympic Games in Beijing and is currently 49th in the World. Two other archers from Chinese Taipei Kuo Cheng-Wei—10th in the World—and Liu Ming-Huang followed at 3rd and 4th places. Fifth was the Korean Jang Seung-Hoon.   In Compound Women, Kwon Oh-Hyang proved once again that Korea now also has top archers in this division. She finished 1st with 675 points and was closely followed by the American Erika Anschutz with also 675 points. Viktoria Balzhanova (RUS) took 3rd place with 670 points. Fourth in the World Ranking, her teammate Albina Loginova finished 4th with 669 points. Maja Marcen from Slovenia (22nd) ended up just two points behind at 5th place. These girls proved that the compound level in University events is getting higher and higher!   The team qualifications were led by Korea in both Recurve and Compound Women with 1953 and 1999, respectively. In the Compound Men category the leading team was USA with 2028 points followed by France with 2016. In Recurve Men the local team of Chinese Taipei took the 1st place with 1988 followed by Korea.   The mixed team of Chinese Taipei with Yuan Shu-Chi and Wang Cheng-Pang finished 1st of the Recurve division with 1313 points. Chang Hye-Jin and Jang Seung-Hoon from Korea ranked 2nd with 1313 points and Sanzhi Obodoeva and Alexey Borodin for Russia were 3rd with 1272 points.   In the Compound division the first team was USA with Erika Anschutz and JeddGreshock (1359 points). Korea represented by Hang Kwon-Oh and Kim Dong-Gyu took the 2nd place with 1345 points, followed by the Russians Viktoria Balzhanova and Anton Khylyschenko) with 1344 points.   The mixed team competition is an innovation in archery adopted by FISU in its archery events to promote the sport among youth and university students. FITA is also developing this type of competition, aiming to introduce it in the regular FITA events such as World Championships and World Cups. A team is one male and one female archer who shoot together on a Hit/Miss target at 70m (Academic Round). The top 8 teams both in the Compound and Recurve divisions will shoot the elimination phases of this event on 10 July at 4:10 p.m. (local time).   More rain is expected tomorrow… For the benefit of the archers, let’s hope it will not be too heavy! The pictures of the day...   Juan Carlos Holgado FITA Communication