WORLD CUP – OGDEN (USA)

The 3rd and the last  stage World Cup of the year had a multiple importance for the 383 archers from 66 countries of the world. Other than it simply being a World Cup stage, it was the last chance to qualify for the World Cup final in Tokio and also it was the last chance for recurves, both teams and individuals to qualify for the Olympic Games in London.

After 72 qualifying arrows, archers shot the mixed team event and also tried to qualify for the one spot for a recurve team and one spot for a compound mixed team that will be shooting agains Japan's mixed teams in Tokio later this year. Both the recurve  (Ellison, Nichols) and compound American team (Wilde, Colin) dominated the field and qualified to shoot in Tokio against the host representatives.

All the categories had the elimination day on wednesday that week, starting with the 1/48 final and ending wth the semi finals at the end of the day. Through a whole lot of very tight matches, the recurve men's side was represented by Luis Alvarez (Mexico), Laurence Godfrey (Great Britain), Gael Prevost (France) and Tarundeep Rai (India) as it's finalists for the end of the week.

The bronze medal match was very close and had to be resolved with a shoot off. With an almost perfect shot hitting the X10 ring, Gael Prevost won and took the bronze. In the gold final, Luis Alvarez, a relatively new face to the World Cup, had to win over more experianced Laurence Godfrey if he wanted to qualify for the World Cup final in Tokio. And he did exactly that, dominating the whole match and winning with 6-0!

The whole week, the mexican recurve teams were shooting very well which resulted with 2 individual finalists in Ogden-one being Luis Alvarez and the other his team mate Alejandra Valencia in the recurve women's category. Next to her, the other 3 woman recurve finalists were Kristina Timofeeva from Russia, Jennifer Nichols from USA and Magali Foulon from Spain.  Continuing a great week of shooting Alejandra Valencia (Mexico) won over Magali Foulon and took the bronze for Mexico.  The Russian Timofeeva did not have it easy to shoot against local favourite Jeniffer Nichols in front of her home crowd but she shot a great match and took the victory with 6-2.

The US team dominated again in the compound finals, both in the team and individual matches.

Reo Wilde took yet another World Cup gold (3rd this yearand 4 in a row!) over Peter Elzinga (from Netherlands) in a very close match . The bronze medal match was shot by the current world champion Christopher Perkins (Canada) and Julien Pierre Deloche (France). The Canadian Perkins struggled through the whole match but The French Deloche stayed solid and strong during their first face to face match and took the victory and the bronze medal with 146 to 140.

The women's compound gold final was an all American match; Jamie van Natta against her team mate Christie Colin. Both of the ladies shot well and showed great performance that in the end led to a shoot of after 15 arrows. Jamie shot first and scored an 8 and opened the door for Colin who happily took her chance and won with a 10 and took the gold.

Kristina Berger of Germany and Laura Longo shot the bronze medal match.They already met and shot against each other once in Antalya when Berger won that match. She repeated the same here, dominating the whole match and winning with 147 (which was the high score of the day for both men and women compound!)

The Olympic quota tournaments was again, same as in Amsterdam the highlight for most of the recurve archers, good for some and bad for the others. The 6 teams that managed to qualify for London are India , Japan and Chines Taipei on the men's side and Usa, Mexico and Japan on the women's side. There was a lot of great teams and a lot of high scores that day but these 6 teams fully deserved their quotas for London with a very consistent and high performance that they showed all week and esspecially on the quota qualifying day.

The next day there were still 15 individual quota places left; 8 for women and 7 for men and the archers that managed to stay focused even under the biggest pressure they have been any time recently are: Yavor Vasilev Hristov (Bulgaria),  Denis Gankin (Kazahstan), Rafal Dobrowolski (Poland), Mark Javier (Phillipines), Klemen Strajhar (Slovenia), Axel Muller (Switzerland) and Elias Malave (Venezuela) on the men's side. The 8 women's quotas were won by Reena Parnat (Estonia), Evangelia Psarra (Greece), Zhara Dehghanabnavi (Islamic Republic or Iran), Anastassiya Bannova (Kazahstan), Celine Shobinger (Switzerland), Rachel Anne Cabral (Phillipines) , Begul Lokluoglu (Turkey) and Leidys Brito (Venezuela).

Congratulations to all of the archers who won the quota places for London, individual and teams, and good luck to all of them at the Olympic Games!