Koreans are masters of the mind game

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Sydney: The Koreans are masters of the mind game and that is why they are such superb archers, the sport's chief said on Wednesday.

Up to six million people in more than 100 countries have taken up the sport but none can match the razor-sharp concentration and steady nerves of the Koreans.

"It is the historical national sport for them," said Jim Easton, president of the International Archery Federation. "It is the method they used in warfare thousands of years ago. Some Asian countries used the sword, some used the spear. Theirs was the bow and arrow."

In South Korea, promising archers are hand-picked and trained from as young as 13 years old. But it is not just their physical prowess that makes them such devastating opponents.

"The biggest thing of all is mental preparation. This is why they excel over the Western archers - their focus and Zen-like concentration," Easton said at the Sydney Olympics' archery ground where South Korean men and women were again showing their domination.

"You see archers who score perfect scores in practice but when they get to competition, their bodies do things they don't expect them to," Easton told Reuters. "The body you can train and train and train but it is the mind that separates world-class performers from good performers."

The hardest part for the Koreans is picking a team -- "They are all so good," he said.

Sydney has given the sport of archery a chance to widen its horizons still further. "We have archers from the Central African Republic and Uganda here for the first time," he said.

But isn't it difficult to motivate other archers when faced with the might of the great Korean machine?

"It is a little discouraging for the other countries to come up against such outstanding archers," Easton conceded

At the opening ceremony for Sydney 2000, North and South Korea buried 50 years of enmity to march together under the same flag. "We had a follow-up to that when a North Korean woman came fourth in yesterday's women's event, She just missed a medal," Easton said.

Archery may be an intriguing mind game but it is certainly not conducted in silence anymore. The crowds cheer and blow horns from the stands at the Homebush Bay site.

"It used to be 'Quiet, don't say a word while they are shooting.' Now they like it. It energises the archers to have the crowd cheering and yelling," said Easton who grew up in Los Angeles where he first developed his passion for archery.

"People in Hollywood were doing archery then. It was an in-sport."Now the Koreans are the big stars whose unerring accuracy is so superb that experts believe they could even outshoot Robin Hood the English folk hero most readily associated with the bow and arrow.

"You have to respect what they are doing," said Easton, lost in admiration for their pin-point precision.



(c) Reuters Limited.