Now it’s time for River City Live’s Not So-lympics! Today we are trying out our own spin on archery, but first, let’s get some history.
Archery is one of the oldest sports that is still practiced today. In 1200 BC, the Hittites and Assyrians shot their bows from chariots, becoming fearsome opponents in battle. Archery was the favourite sport of the Egyptian pharaohs during the 18th dynasty. Many centuries later, some of the earliest recorded archery tournaments took place during the Zhou (Chou) dynasty in China.
Archery first appeared in the Olympic Games in 1900, was contested again in 1904, 1908 and 1920, then again—after an absence of 52 years—from 1972 to the present.
Competitive archery has various forms, but all have the same aim: to shoot your arrows as close to the centre of the target as possible. In the Olympics, competitors aim at a target from a distance of 70 metres. Scoring in archery is very simple: you just add up the number of points based on where your arrows hit the target. The highest score for a single arrow is 10 for hitting the inner gold ring, while the least (for hitting the outer white ring) is one point. In an archery competition the winner is either the person who has the highest cumulative total score after a set number of arrows, or the one who has successfully overcome all opponents faced in a knockout scenario.
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