A team of Kiwis will cross international waters to compete in the biennial World Field Archery Championship (WFAC) at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil in early August.
The team heading over, known as the Black Arrows, consists of 21 archers, with ages ranging from 10 years old to 72 years old. They will be facing 280 other archers from 23 countries in the competition.
Linda Lainchbury (Ngāti Porou, Whakatohea) and Ethan Russ (Ngāpuhi) are two of the Māori representatives on the team.
Lainchbury already has six world titles in field archery and two for indoor archery. She has been doing the sport for 24 years, after originally starting with her children.
“I just needed a sport that was less physical, as I was getting older.
‘The competitive side came out’
“I found that it was the mental side, the fitness side, and you need to be extremely disciplined to do it very, very well. So I went into it with my kids about 11 and 12 years old.
“The competitive side came out and so I took it quite seriously, and so I just built it from there.”
Russ has only been doing the sport for eight years after one of his friends prompted him to try it out. He has won many national titles over his career. This will be his first time competing in a world championship but winning worlds isn’t his goal.
“I’m after to do the best that I can do because I don’t want to put too much expectations on myself or else I will do worse, so I gotta go in there with a clear mind.
“Shoot how I wanna shoot and have a good time too because that’s the main reason to do it.
“A medal will be cool, fourth would be cool, second to last would be cool. As long as I feel like I’m shooting my best, I’m not too fussed,” Russ said.
There has been a lot of arrows shot in the past few months in preparation for the worlds. Lainchbury told Te Ao Māori News she shoots 180 arrows every day.
“I’ve done the world champs many times so for me it will be a personal score to try and get, obviously, a gold medal, another world title, would be something that I’m after.
“There’s a few women in my division, so I need to put the pedal down and so training for that,” she said.
She noted there were no professional shooters in the country, saying the Black Arrows weren’t doing it full-time like athletes in other sports.
“A field event like [WFAC] is five days in a row and probably nine hours a day.
“Unless you take time off and train two months beforehand and get funded, you cannot train for that.
“You have to be able to shoot as much as you can every day to try to keep your fitness up.
“You don’t really know what the terrain is going to be like, so you have to really prepare for everything.”
Russ practises three times a week shooting 150 arrows each time.
“Sometimes I do better if I don’t train. Often, sometimes, because my expectations are a bit lower when I have high expectations, I shoot bad.”
More tamariki wanted
With this his first international archery competition, he thinks he will probably be excited once he is on his way to Brazil.
“I’m one of those people that don’t really think about things until it’s actually happening.
“Like everyone’s like, ‘oh, you must be excited’ and I was like, I’ll be excited when I when I’m on the plane, I guess.
“I’m looking forward to it. I’m not finding too much pressure about it because I’m making sure I don’t have pressure, ‘cause it’ll put me off my archery game,” he said.
Lainchbury hopes to see more tamariki participate in the sport.
“If you can get your kids out there to start archery now, it doesn’t cost much to get them into it.
“It’s about the mental side of it, it’s about being the best that they can be, and it stems into everything else that they do in their life.”