Britain at the Olympics contd.
As for the gentlemen's round in 1908, William Dod, Lottie's brother, led the field at the end of the first day with a score of 403 thereby making Olympic archery look like a family event, one of the factors which must have added further interest for its followers, another being the fact that the Dods were descended from Sir Anthony Dod of Edge who commanded the English archers at Agincourt. Nor was William much favoured in this contest since, like his sister, he was relatively new to the competitive archery circuit and was now competing against five British national champions and one American titleist, Henry Richardson, aged only nineteen and one of the youngest ever male medallists from the United States. Again like his sister, Dod was only 10 points ahead of his closest contender, Reginald Brooks-King, with John Penrose occupying third place. However, on the second day, the family parallels soon began to diverge. As Lottie's performance collapsed, William managed to hold his ground with a score of 412 while Brooks-King slipped into fourth place with 375 and Richardson moved up to second place with 417, the best round of the tournament, but, when added to his first score of 343, insufficient to topple either Dod, who won the gold medal with a final score of 815, or Brooks-King, who took the silver with 768, only 8 points ahead of the young American who had to settle for bronze. Compared with some of Ford's Double York scores of well over 1,000, those achieved at the 1908 Olympics fell far short of his but, with the wind and rain presenting themselves as the most formidable opponents over a long-distance round, high scores can not have been anticipated. However, the broher and sister element on the first day and the new American challenge on the second must have surely kept the flame alive and bristling for both the competitors and spectators such as they were.
Two days later, Richardson tried his hand at the Men's Continental-style event in which every archer shot forty arrows singly at a distance of fifty metres. It was a competition dominated by the French who managed to maintain their tradition with Eugene Grisot (283), Louis Vernet (256) and Gustave Cabaret (255) occupying the first three places. Richardson came 15th with a score of 171 and John Keyworth, the only official British competitor, 12th with 190.
Archery was dropped from the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, made a brief reappearance at Antwerp in 1920 without any British competitors and, after a long period of hibernation, was not reinstated until 1972 at Munich where the games were overshadowed by the Black September massacre and the archers swapped imperial Yorks and Nationals for metric FITAs. Since then, it has undergone a serious revival both at national and international levels and, while much of the equipment has evolved in line with developing technologies, there are still clubs of longbow enthusiasts who not only help to keep that tradition alive but, with their relatively simple instruments crafted from natural resources, also enjoy competing against archers equipped with more modern and sophisticated tools. Indeed, as much pleasure can be derived from shooting traditional two-way target on a line of longbowmen as shooting field targets with a mixed-style group and, although the disciplines are usually strictly categorised, it is nonetheless highly satisfying to see even an occasional shot from a 'bent stick' wiping the eye of the hi-tec compound machine. At Olympic level today, however, the expectations of our 'semi-professional' archers need to be both high and realistic: high to promote a positive winning condition and realistic to both embrace and counteract any of the countless deficiencies which might arise prior to the follow-through once the arrow has left the string. Archery, by nature, is a sport laden with variables and it is the individual's ability to accomodate them which makes it so rewarding. Whether this ability of our 2008 archers was clouded by some of the external factors already mentioned still awaits public confirmation. What is certain is that, whatever factors were at play a century ago, the outcome of the 1908 Olympics has stood the test of time...as indeed has the traditional longbow.
Sources used:
wikipedia.org, sports-reference.com, olympics.org, guardian.co.uk, bbc.co.uk and archery-interchange.com
