Making Archery Watchable

According to World Archery (WA), there are 30million archers in the world spread over 156 federations and that's just the ones WA know about*. Very few of them watch archery because, lets be honest .. ITS BORING! Archery is a DOING sport, not a spectator sport. Or at least this is how it used to be. Competitions tended to be all about a lot of arrows, shot over hours, slowly accumulating points til the winner in each category was the one with the most points. Your editorial team here at GA have sat through quite a few 144 arrow, all day competitions as field party and trust us, its dull. I mean take a nap between boss moves dull. No-one was going to a shoot to spectate .. at least not willingly! :oD  However, with the coming of the internet/YouTube age, there were now platforms you could show off archery easily IF you had a product that was good to watch. Lets take a look at how attempts were made to make competitions more watchable and entertaining ... not always successfully!

Quite literally Hit or Miss: World Archery experimented with a hit or miss system for compounders back in 2010. This involved three targets pinned up horizontally. Each had a yellow spot scoring zone 10cm across, a red miss area around it with a blue background. The system assigned one point for a hit in the yellow and zero for anywhere else - a miss! :o) One arrow was shot at each target and the distance was 50m. This was a simple, visual scoring system that was obvious to even the most casual observer what was going on. This approach was tested on two stages of the Hyundai Archery World Cup in 2010. While it was hoped the system could be expanded into most international competitions, it was pretty quickly considered a failure. Why? Because archers hated it (several being visually peeved on WA coverage of those stages) and in one stage, the extremely windy conditions made the archers miss repeatedly. Not exactly showcasing their steely eyed compounder skills! As a result it was quickly removed from that years World Cup and the previous method (122cm face at 70m) was reinstated. The faces are still printed under WA license although can be hard to find. You can check out a three minute video on this subject here.

you're scoring your arrows 12, 10, 9 is that right?.......  JUDGE!

The 12 point dot: Back in the dark,depressing days of COVID near everyone was trapped indoors .. bored. People wanted things to keep them amused. Certainly its how this website morphed into its current unique format as our editor found his writing muse (probably after all the alcohol in the house ran out). With all World Cup competitions cancelled for the foreseeable future, World Archery hit upon the cunning idea of letting international archers work from home AND tap into the vast potential viewing market of trapped archers. Using webcams and laptops they would set up indoor head to head competitions called The Lockdown Knockout. The archers could shoot from home/garage, film the target as the arrows hit routing the feed to WA who would collate and broadcast it to us via YouTube. The round was a head to head on a Vegas style 40cm triple inner face but with a twist. Situated on one face (the upper), between the 7 and 8 rings at the 6 o'clock position, was a white dot 15mm across. During the end you could call you wanted to go for the dot. If you hit it, it was worth 12 points. This suddenly made ends tactical. Did you go for the 12 early, forcing your opponent to reply but you risked missing the dot and handing the end away. Or did you hold off, keeping it as a hail mary, if you were behind. This made for some interesting situations including Brady Ellison shooting a perfect 10 10 10 and still losing the end to Steve Wijler by a point! This face is still used especially in the prestigious Lancaster Archery Classic. We wrote quite a bit on this format change back in 2020 in one of our earliest posts. Article on the 12 point dot.

This one goes to 11**: Competition's second most recent change was implemented by World Archery during the 2025 outdoor season and again its compound. There are many things wrong with compound (just ask our editor but be prepared for a long ranty session). However, here we are thinking about its accuracy. Normally that wouldn't be an issue, accuracy be good no? Well, not when its increasingly hard to separate the competitors. Best score for an arrow is a 10. Is it easy? No its not but for professional archers with telescopic sights, cams, release aids and spirit levels ... its well doable and does not actually need perfect to achieve. Good enough will do and many many archers are good enough resulting in insanely narrow margins between winner and also rans. WA decided to try to step it up a notch for compounders making good enough not quite good enough. How did they do that? As of the third stage in the World Cup in Antalya, an X on a 80cm face at 50m became worth 11 points. This means you really do need another level of accuracy to be the best. We suppose you could just aim to get everything into the 10 ring and trust to lucky dispersion getting you the X's ... but we suspect the best archers would always be the luckiest ones. Ella Gibson, lying 2nd in the world rankings (end of outdoor season 2025), thinks it a good move .. "We should be rewarded for being the most precise. Some will try and aim even harder, trying to shoot an X every time. I think it will be great for the sport .. and makes for more exciting tv". If this works as intended it will separate the absolute cream from the best and could, as Ella predicts, push performances on another step to perfection.

Whiter shade of Teal***: The most recent change to make archery easier viewing for everyone was made during the August 2025 World Games in Chengdu (China). The face to the left was shot in the games field round. And in World Archery, field faces are a yellow spot with black surround the yellow. This unfortunately makes it very difficult for spectators to see where arrows are on the face given most arrow shafts are black. So .. cunning plan. Lets make the targets NOT BLACK!  Its a subtle change that makes the arrow shaft more easily visible, especially in lower light conditions. However it retains a very similar aiming experience archery folks be used to. Archers DO NOT like change. So, for minimal disruption, people can see where the arrows are on the face but minimises the impact to athletes and competitive balance. Seems like a win win. This teal target face will only be used for the 2025 World Games so its not going to affect any other competition .. at least at present. Feedback from this event will be used to evaluate the success (or otherwise) of this change and will no doubt guide future decisions but whispers so far seem pretty positive.

Wanna go heid ta heid pal?: We've kept the best till last. After the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the IOC informed World Archery (or FITA as it was then) that if they did not improve the watch-ability of archery for TV, it would be dropped from the Olympic program. This would have been a catastrophe for archery relegating it to the fringes of sport, crippling loss of sponsorships and the end of funding at national levels. At the time the Olympic round was the FITA (now called the WA1440). It required 144 arrows shot over an entire day and 4 distances. There were then subsequent partial FITA's to whittle down the numbers further. It was a good judge of who was the most consistently good archer but so so boring. Paint drying was heart stoppingly exciting in comparison. Jim Easton (of Easton Arrows), then President of FITA, was faced with a dilemma .. find a format that made archery exciting but still allowed a decent test of an archers skill or its bye bye Olympics. The Olympic round (WA720) and Head to Head was their solution .. one that still rankles with purists today. The round consists of a 72 arrow ranking round shot at 70m on 122cm face. The initial version had two such ranking rounds but this was later cut to one. Once ranked, archers are placed in tournament brackets and then shoot one on one in an elimination style competition til last archer standing wins. We covered this in detail during the Paris Olympics. Showcased at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, the round wasn't instantly loved with many traditionalists refusing to accept it was fair way to select the best and it diluted the title of Olympic champion. This mindset is still prevalent in many older WA members and more traditional federations today. However, the audience got it instantly and when there has been widespread tv coverage of Olympic archery, viewing figures and reaction have been extremely positive. London 2012 and Paris 2024 both being massive successes with edge of the seat moments with full stands and fantastic viewing figures of entertained archery fans. Our editor maintains that the Gents gold medal match at Paris was the greatest head to head match ever .. disagree and he'll ask to meet you round the back of the container to discuss it. ;o)

So to sum up our opinion, with the exception of the Hit or Miss round, World Archery has been quite successful in improving the watch-ability of shootie. What we do is repetitive and short of an inflight bird getting hit with an arrow (yes, that has happened), we aren't the most dynamic spectator sport. That doesn't mean we can't be entertaining with the Olympic head to head format probably the best decision for that goal that's been made and a great call by Jim Easton and FITA. Now .. where to watch some archery?

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* There's another 50k in the IFAA although some of them will be in WA as well (Like John, Steven, Bill, Henri, Finday and Geo). Then there's bowhunters in the USA who don't do target or field ... so lots and lots of us!
** Give yourself 100 GA trivia points if you know the movie the section title and pic refer to.
*** The colour used for you printer nerds is Pantone 4185C. Approximately equivalent to hex code #387F97, RGB (56, 127, 51) and CYMK (62.9, 15.9, 0, 40.8). You can tell our editor worked in print infrastructure can't you!

Olympic rings by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay