Hoyt Limb fails at Olympics
Hoyt Archery: We were deeply saddened as we witnessed Antii Vikstrom’s limb break during his match today. At Hoyt, our mission is to produce the highest quality equipment to match the excellence of the world’s best archers. We sincerely apologize to Antii and Team Finland.
While leading 5-3 in the 5th set of his 1/32 round match against Khairul Anuar Mohamad of Malaysia, Antii Vikstrom of Finland suffered catastrophic failure of his bow’s bottom limb. As you only get 20 seconds for each shot in a head to head round and there are no do overs or make up shots for equipment failure, Antii never had a chance to recover and so lost the set. Likely very shaken, he went on to lose the subsequent shoot off to Mohamad.
Video of the catastrophic failure can be found here.
Apparently this was the second incident to strike Vikstrom at these Olympics. His lower limb failed during the ranking round according to this horribly translated, we assume by google translate which can be extremely unkind, Finnish news article. “Olympic games (for him) ends in tears” (many thanks to Ose Marviner for correcting the title’s bad translation)
While there are no guarantees against equipment failure, such incidents are in the main rare. Usually they are brushed over as unfortunate flukes and in our vice-chair’s case (when cracks appeared in his top limb) the dealers replaced the limbs without quibble. However, for a Hoyt limb to let go on the biggest stage of all … and apparently not just once … well that’s embarrassing and questions will no doubt be being asked right now in Hoyt’s Salt Lake City, Utah centre of operations.
Why would this be worrying for them? Given that Hoyt have an extensive Pro-Staff of top archers including recurve archery household names such as Ellison, Deloche, Kaufhold, Oh Jin Hyek, Loginova, Duenas and Valladont all sponsored to shoot Hoyt kit … any doubt about reliability could cause these archers to consider their positions and that would be terrible PR for Hoyt. Hoyt is a company that has built its reputation on great archers being great using their kit. Its going to be all about Risk Reward … is the risk of limb failure possibly during a competition worth the reward of sponsorship.
Potentially a rough time for Hoyt and one hell of a brutal disappointment for Vikstrom.
Original breaking of the story with pictures and reactions from many archers from around the world are to be found on World Archery’s facebook site
Hi everyone.Four years ago, I asked Hoyt if they could provide some spare parts for a ten years old riser.
My message was perfectly kind and polite – a bad habit (😀) I got when I was a boy, and never lost.
The answer I received was perfectly rough, “hello” and “goodbye” are unknown words for them now. They juste told me “Ask your local dealer”.
If they dont like their customers, I don’t know them anymore.
So, their catastrophic failure of limbs is no surprise to me.
They care about money now, not about their products or the people who use them.
Have a nice day, fellows archers.