Advantage India: compound archery included in 2028 LA olympics | Sport-others News

Nearly two years after ignoring it for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) added compound mixed team archery competition to the Games programme on Wednesday.
Along with archery, mixed team events were also added in table tennis, golf, gymnastics, rowing coastal beach sprint and athletics, which will have 4x100m mixed relay in addition to 4×400.
The number of teams in the women’s and men’s football tournaments will also be swapped. The women’s competition at the LA Games will have 16 teams and the men will have 12.
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These — and many other tweaks to the programme – mean for the first time in Olympic hory, there will be more female athlete quota spots (5,655) than male athlete quota spots (5,543) across the 36 sports.
However, the inclusion of compound will come as music to the ears of Indian archers.
For more than a decade, archery has been a sport that has promised a lot but delivered little for India on the Olympic stage. While the recurve archers continued to buckle under pressure, with South Korea’s unyielding dominance, India has emerged as a proper compound force in the last three years.
Compound archery, invented in the USA in the 1960s, was included in World Archery Championships for the first time in 1995. It’s a style of archery that uses bows with more mechanical components, like cams and pulleys, which make drawing the bowstring easier and more consent. Story continues below this ad
The compound archers have frequently won medals at the World Cups and World Championships. At the Hangzhou Asian Games, India had a clean sweep of gold medals in compound archery, with Jyothi Surekha Vennam leading the march. For someone like Vennam, who has won it all so far, the LA Olympics medal will now be the ultimate goal.
As per the latest mixed team rankings, India are second behind the USA, having won medals in three out of the four events considered for ranking points in 2024. This is apart from half a dozen other medals won in mixed team events at the world and continental events.
In a statement, the World Archery President Prof Dr Ugur Erdener said: “This is a monumental step forward for the sport and for the millions of compound archers worldwide who have long sought Olympic recognition.”
“It is the first time since archery’s reintroduction to the Olympic Games in 1972 that a new bowstyle is added to the competition,” the federation said in a statement.Story continues below this ad
Meanwhile, there were format changes in shooting as well, with the sport’s government body announcing that the 50m Rifle 3P finals in the Los Angeles Olympics will see shooters competing in only the standing series in the final. In the earlier format, shooters had to shoot in three stages – standing, kneeling and prone – making it a tough technical event.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd

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