To learn more, discover everything there is to know about field archery.
What is field archery?
Field archery is a discipline that involves shooting at fixed circular targets on a course in natural terrain. These targets will be of different sizes and will be placed at varying distances, heights, and angles.
Generally, archers shoot at distances from 5 to 60m on black and yellow targets. This distance is marked when known by the archer and unmarked when it remains unknown.
What are the targets like in field archery?
First, you should know that there are 4 different target sizes for field archery: 80cm, 60cm, 40cm, and 20cm in diameter.
Archers who practice field archery shoot at yellow and black targets containing six concentric scoring rings. The center ring corresponds to 6 points while the outer ring gives 1 point. The yellow rings count for 6 and 5 points while the black rings count for 4, 3, 2, and 1 point. When the target is marked, the score is zero.
These targets will be set up on marked courses so that archers can shoot safely, retrieve their arrows, and move forward. They are usually grouped in fours. Regarding the shooting position, for archer visibility, they are marked on the ground by pegs.
How does a field archery competition work?
A field archery competition includes three events: individual event, mixed doubles event, and team event.
A mixed team consists of one male archer and one female archer. They must shoot in the same bow category.
A team consists of three archers of the same gender. Each of them shoots with different bow categories, including recurve bow, compound bow and barebow.
A competition consists of three phases including:
- A course of 24 targets located at unknown distances.
- A course of 24 targets located at known distances
- A course of 12 targets at unknown distances and another course of 12 targets at unknown distances.
Archers will be ranked according to their total points for the individual event. The top two archers with the most points will be exempt from the pool phase. They will automatically advance to the semi-finals.
Regarding the mixed event and team event, there are seedings for the match bracket. For the mixed doubles event, the seedings will be determined by the highest-ranked man and woman from the same country. The seedings for the team event will be determined by the ranking of the three best archers of the same gender from a country. These are the ones who achieve the best score.
Regarding the pool phase, note that it applies only to the individual event. For this phase, archers will be divided into groups. The lowest ranked from each pool will compete. The loser will be eliminated and the winner will face the next archer and so on until only one archer remains in each pool. Then, the winners among the two will face off in the final.
How to count scores?
In field archery, all matches are played according to the cumulative scoring format to finish with the highest score.
A match consists of 15 arrows for an individual match, 16 arrows for a mixed doubles match, and 24 arrows for a team match. For a mixed doubles match, each archer will shoot 8 arrows while for a team match, each archer will shoot 8 arrows each.
It should be noted that for field archery, a time limit of 3 minutes per target will be allowed from the moment the archer takes their shooting position. They must therefore position themselves quickly as soon as the shooting station is free. A competition of field archery usually lasts for a day.