The Compound Strikes Back

Here be compounds!

On April 9th, World Archery (WA) released this statement "The first-ever Olympic medal for compound archers will be awarded at the 2028 Olympic Games, following the International Olympic Committee’s announcement today that the compound mixed team event will be added to the archery programme in Los Angeles." 

With that statement the archery world experienced a seismic shift. Not since 1972 when Recurve was added to the Olympics has archery seen such a big change. Its going to affect archery in a lot of ways - some very unexpected - potentially even to the club archer level! Our editor has been muttering something about the "Olympic ideal being soiled" but, with recurve being his true love, he was never going to be happy with this.

So what do we actually know other than compound is in? We reached out to a contact close to World Archery and what they told us was pretty shocking. It seems that after the original rejection back in October 2023, negotiations continued behind the scenes. These back room discussions resulted in the nod to compound (the IOC do have a history of shady deals). However, right now, no-one currently knows anything outside of the most basic information and that includes WA. The format will be mixed teams (1 dude, 1 dudette). There will be 12 nations competing (24 archers total). This is a one time deal in Los Angeles with no guarantee that compound continues in future games .. and that is all we know for sure!

Currently, they don't know if its to be indoors or outdoors, the size of the face or the distance to be shot. They don't even know how selection will be made or wither these 24 archers will be a new allocation of athlete slots to archery or will have to come from the existing pool of 128 athletes that archery gets (64 men, 64 women). On the last point, "additional" was used in the announcement by the IOC but there's no guarantee what that means at present. The IOC are notoriously vague till they get nailed down on details.

The round selected is going to be vitally important. If its indoors, its going to need either a purpose build venue (expensive) or repurposed one built for another sport (scheduling). Compounds at 18m can be pretty tedious when trying to get a winner if the rules aren't cut throat. Look at the Vegas 300 where it can take a dozen or more shoot off rounds to clear out the field till there's just two left. If its outdoors it can't upstage the recurve as that would be a disaster for archery. Recurve is shot world wide, compound isn't which is one of its great failings. But 80cm faces at 50m is a pretty miserable show of skill for a bow with telescopic sights, cams, spirit levels and a trigger. 80cm faces at 70m? 60cm faces at 50m? 11 points for an X? This is a nightmare of options where one wrong choice could wreck compound's chances of returning for the Brisbane 2032 games OR could detract from recurve's standing.

SCOOP ... the compound pictogram for LA28

Then there are other ways this affects international archery. If WA has to reduce the number of recurvers selected to allow the compounders in, only 52 recurvers for each gender will get to go.The IOC is extremely determined to keep the number of athletes to 10,500 max at the games so likely there's no additional slots**. Reason for this was what occurred at the 2016 Rio games where there were 11,238 athletes and it was a total FUBAR. Now reducing the number of archers might not actually be that bad .. in a harsh way. Too many archers are going to the Olympics posting scores that are aren't that great. The national allocation system allows archers from weaker nations to attend the games but they get smashed in the first round head to heads as they have to face Koreans or other top archers. The bottom dozen ranking round slots have somewhat become participation places. In the ladies individual ranking round in Paris the lowest score was 147 points lower than the highest! Reducing numbers may crush a few dreams but will improve the overall quality and competitiveness of archery on display.

The headache for WA is they are going to have to rework their entire selection process. For compound, they need to select the nations who get to field a team and who those archers are. Then they have to modify their current selection process for a lowered number of recurves .. again assuming no new slots for the compounders. All this will have to be worked into the World Cup rankings and probably tried out a couple of times in trial runs before 2028.

Next is funding which will hit every nation interested in fielding a compound team. We wrote recently about how Team GB is funded and while many aspects of squad are usable by any type of archer, some are not. Also do you keep squad size the same and reduce recurve members to allow compounders in (thus funding covers the same number of archers) OR add compounders to the existing squad requiring the funding to cover more archers than originally intended. This one could hit us club archery in the pocket as AGB potentially would need more money to support a bigger squad. This will probably have AGB in midnight meetings and running up a huge phone bill as they look for extra sponsors. If they can't find the money externally, our fees will go up.

And that's all we've got, with 90% of it conjecture at this point. We know compounders will be strutting around LA 2028 like they own the place but its a one time deal that might, like break dancing, never be seen at the Olympics again (please God don't let the break dancers back!). With luck, in the coming months, we'll get more information either in press releases or through our editor's dodgy World Archery connections. So, to keep up to date with this hot story, stay tuned to this bat channel ...

**Update: The LA28 programme maintains the core athlete quota of 10,500, with an extra 698 quota places allocated for the five sports proposed by the LA28 Organising Committee. This means the compound places won't reduce the recurve allocation in 2028.

Update to the Update: Some confusion on the places issue currently. USA Archery reported the places WILL come out of the recurve allocation. May have to wait a bit to get this clarified. USA Archery also stated that it will be 50M outdoors held in the second part of the games.  

*          *          *

World Archery press release - Compound in the Olympics
Our article discussing why compound was rejected from the Olympics