Indian Archery in 2023: Compound Archers produce dominant show

The year 2023 belonged to Indian compound archers as they dominated with four medals at the World Championships and a clean sweep at the Asian Games 2023. In contrast, recurve archers still trying to cope with the transition period, especially in women's recurve.

India also took their first-ever gold at the world championships and also topped the overall medal tally at the event for the first-ever time. Aditi Swami and Ojas Deotale become the first-ever individual world champions from India.

India finished in the third position in the archery World Cup circuit with 17 medals, 12 in compound and 5 in recurve category. They also booked five places in the World Cup final, which was the most number of entries from India at the season finale of archery.

Here, The Bridge is sprinkling limelight on the performance of Indian Archers throughout the year 2023:

Three world championship titles

India won three gold medals at the 2023 World Archery Championships in Berlin, Germany. This was the first time that any Indian was standing at the top of the podium of this event.

The team of Parneet Kaur, Jyothi Surekha Vennam & Aditi Gopichand Swami finished in the second position in the ranking round. Then, in the elimination round, they pulled off an upset after beating three-time champions Colombia in the semis and the top-seeded Mexico in the final.

Aditi Swami and Ojas Deotale are the other two champions winning the gold in women's and men's compound individual categories respectively. Both the youngsters were making their debut at the event. Ojas snatched the gold after beating the World Number one Mike Schlosser in the semis and Aditi knocked out experienced home compatriot Jyothi Surekha in the semis.

Clean sweep in Compound archery at the Asian Games

Indian compound archers continued the form at the second biggest tournament of the year and generated a miraculous clean sweep performance with five out of gold in the pocket. Ojas Deotale and Jyothi Surekha Vennam won three gold each.

Ojas continued his World Championships winning run with yet another individual gold beating another Indian counterpart Abhishek Verma in the final. Veteran archer Jyothi Surekha Vennam, supported by Dream Sports Foundation, took her World championships revenge from young counterpart Aditi Swami to clinch women's gold.

India takes a total of nine medals from the event, two of them are from recurve archery as well. Indian men's recurve team has an outstanding run and takes a silver medal after losing to South Korea in the final. The women's recurve team takes the bronze beating Vietnam in the bronze medal match

Dhiraj Bommadevara- Rising star from recurve archery

Dhiraj Bommadevara is the lone shining star from the year in recurve archery. He is the only Indian recurve archer who is in the top 15 ranked players in the world. He also won the Paris Olympics quota for India in men's recurve.

The 22-year-old also won an individual medal at the Archery World Cup stage this year and qualified for the World Cup final. He is also showing consistency at the national and international tournaments and has not missed a single major tournament on virtue of trials.

He was the only Indian recurve archer to qualify for that tournament where he upset the Korean legend Kim Woojin in quarters and narrowly missed out on a medal and finished fourth after losing to Mauro Nespoli of Italy in a very close match decided on a shoot-off.

The dismal run continues for the women's recurve

Recurve women's category is the weakest category currently for India. They do not have a single major individual medal from the women's recurve category. The highest-ranked archer in the women's recurve category is Bhajan Kaur who is on 40th rank.

The last medal at the World Cup circuit was from Deepika Kumari in 2021, no archer since then had any major individual title. Indian recurve women's archers could not even make it to the quarterfinal at the Asian Games. The women's team is still able to win a medal as they upset Japan in the quarterfinals to book a spot in the final four, where they won against Vietnam in a Bronze medal match.

Bhajan Kaur and Ankita Bhakat show some good signs in some of the tournaments but lack consistency. They also make mistakes in the ranking round which hamper them as they face tougher opponents in the early rounds only. Recurve women also unable to win any quota so far, will be eyeing that next year at the final qualification tournament.