The women's individual archery event at the 2016 Summer Olympics was held from 5 to 13 August at the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. One of four archery events as part of the 2016 Olympic catalogue of sports, it was the fourteenth time a women's individual competition was contested as a discipline at the Olympic Games. Forty different nations qualified for the event, sending a total of sixty-four archers to compete. The defending Olympic champion was Ki Bo-bae of South Korea.
South Korea's three archers were tipped for success, the nation having won all but one of the event's gold medals since the 1984 Summer Olympics. Ki and her South Korean teammates Choi Mi-sun and Chang Hye-jin dominated the initial ranking round and secured the top three seeds for the elimination rounds, entering the knockout phase having also won gold medal in the women's team event. Choi, who entered ranked as the world's number one archer, was however eliminated in the quarter-finals by Alejandra Valencia of Mexico; world number two Tan Ya-ting of Chinese Taipei, another favourite for the gold medal, also fell at the same stage. Chang defeated Ki in the semi-finals and went on to face Germany's Lisa Unruh in the final, defeating the German to claim her second gold medal of the Games. In the bronze medal match Ki beat Valencia to win her fourth career Olympic medal.
Chang's gold medal victory continued South Korea's near-domination of the event. Archery became South Korea's most successful Olympic discipline, while Unruh's silver medal gave Germany its first Olympic archery medal in sixteen years.
Background
The women's individual event has been held as part of every Summer Olympics archery programme since the reintroduction of the sport at the 1972 Games in Munich; individual competitions for women had also previously been held at the 1904 and 1908 Summer Olympics. Heading into the Rio 2016 event, archers from South Korea had been the most successful overall with seven gold medal victories, success coming particularly from the 1984 Summer Olympics onwards. The United States were ranked second in number of gold medals with four, with Great Britain, the Soviet Union and China having won one apiece.
At the previous Olympic Games held at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, Ki Bo-bae won the gold medal, reclaiming the Olympic title for South Korea after Zhang Juanjuan's victory on home soil at the 2008 Beijing Olympics interrupted a six-time winning streak for South Korea in the women's individual discipline. Ki had narrowly defeated Mexico's Aída Román in a one-arrow shoot-off in the final, earning her a second Olympic gold medal following victory in the women's team event four days earlier. Román and her Mexican teammate Mariana Avitia, who had defeated Khatuna Lorig of the United States in the bronze medal match, became Mexico's first ever Olympic medal-winners in archery.
An official test event, the Aquece Rio International Archery Challenge, was held over eight days at the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí in September 2015. The purpose of the event was to evaluate the venue's preparations and give archers and coaches the chance to familiarise themselves with the location and schedule ahead of the Games the following year. South Korea's Choi Mi-sun emerged victorious in the women's individual event by defeating Tan Ya-ting of Chinese Taipei in the final, with Mackenzie Brown of the United States third and Japan's Kaori Kawanaka finishing in fourth.
Qualification
Sixty-four places were available for the event with each National Olympic Committee (NOC) represented by a maximum of three archers. Thirty-three of these places were open for the eleven nations qualifying for the Olympic women's team event, the 2015 World Archery Championships' women's team recurve event held in Copenhagen acting as the primary qualifying tournament in awarding twenty-four places. Eight nations - China, Colombia, Georgia, India, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Russia - secured the maximum berth of archers as the highest-placed teams. The remaining three team entries were decided at the Final Qualification Tournament held as part of the third stage of the 2016 Archery World Cup in Antalya, with Italy, Chinese Taipei, and Ukraine securing the final three woman positions. As the host of the 2016 Olympics, Brazil automatically qualified for three places as the twelfth team nation.
The NOCs that were unsuccessful in winning a three-member team entry were each limited to qualifying one archer. Of the twenty-eight remaining qualification positions, eight were awarded to the NOCs of the highest-ranked archers at the 2015 World Archery Championships women's individual recurve event, fourteen to those at a series of qualifying tournaments organised by the continental archery federations, and three to those at the Final Qualification Tournament in Antalya. The final three places were awarded to NOCs that entered fewer than eight athletes in individual disciplines at the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics, the motivation being seek to increase representation from non-traditional archery nations as well as abiding by the universal representation ethos of the Olympic Charter. The three NOCs selected were Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Myanmar.
National selections
With the qualification positions for the Olympic event awarded to the NOCs of the successful archers, rather than the archers themselves, each NOC was free to choose its representatives through its own selection procedure. Defending Olympic champion Ki was chosen alongside Olympic debutants Choi Mi-sun and Chang Hye-jin to head the South Korean squad. The three had placed highest in the Korean national team selection competition which concluded in April 2016, Chang beating Kang Chae-young into third-place having narrowly missed out on Olympic selection four years earlier. Aída Román, the silver medalist from the 2012 Olympics, was joined by Gabriela Bayardo and 2011 Pan American Games champion Alejandra Valencia to spearhead the Mexican team, with London 2012 bronze medalist Mariana Avitia failing to rank highly enough in the national selection procedure to contest a third Olympic Games.
Several nations selected experienced Olympians. Great Britain's Naomi Folkard and Georgia's Khatuna Narimanidze and Kristine Esebua were all chosen to compete in their fourth Games, while Greece's selection of Evangelia Psarra made her the most experienced Olympian in the field, Psarra contesting her fifth consecutive Olympic Games. The Chinese Taipei team featured one change from its London 2012 trio, Lin Shih-chia joining Tan Ya-ting and Le Chien-ying in what journalist John Stanley described as a "formidable" line-up. Russia too made just one change, retaining Ksenia Perova and Inna Stepanova from their 2012 team and picking Tuyana Dashidorzhieva as their third entrant. Following the publication of the McLaren Report concerning allegations of state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes, the trio were approved and cleared to compete by the World Archery Federation in July 2016 having had no history of using performance-enhancing drugs.
India also selected two athletes from its 2012 squad for its three-woman contingent, former youth world champion Deepika Kumari and Laishram Bombayla Devi partnering Olympic newcomer Laxmirani Majhi in the country's latest attempt to secure its first Olympic archery medal. In contrast, Italy's team of three was entirely new, Guendalina Sartori captaining the squad after the retirement of six-time Olympian Natalia Valeeva. Brazil likewise featured three Olympic debutantes in its lineup, the performances Ane Marcelle dos Santos, Sarah Nikitin, and Marina Canetta in the second and third stages of the 2016 Archery World Cup meriting their selection for the host nation.
Australia, Canada, and the United States were among those to send first-time Olympians as their sole representatives. Alice Ingley was promoted from her reserve role at the 2012 Olympics having shown good form at team selection camps, while Mackenzie Brown beat four-time Olympian Khatuna Lorig to victory at the US women's trials to secure her first Olympic berth. Canada nominated Georcy-Stéphanie Picard, who had previously represented her country at the 2015 Pan American Games. Zahra Nemati, the reigning Paralympic champion in the W1/W2 wheelchair discipline, was selected by Iran for her Olympic debut following her silver medal at the 2018 Asian Archery Championships. Nemati entered as the only archer competing in both the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics.
Format
The women's individual was an outdoor target archery event using recurve bows. Held under World Archery-approved rules, archers shot at a 122 cm-wide target from a distance of 70 metres, each arrow earning between one and ten points depending on how close it landed to the centre of the target. The competition comprised an initial ranking round, five elimination rounds, and two finals matches which decided the winners of the gold, silver, and bronze medals. In the ranking round, which took place on 5 August, each of the 64 archers entering the competition shot a total of 72 arrows. The total score of each archer was used to seed the archers into the following five-round single-elimination tournament, the highest-scoring archer receiving the number one seed. If two or more archers finished with the same total score, the number of arrows shot in the central 10-ring on the target was used as a tie-breaker. If two or more archers were still tied, then the number of arrows shot within the inner-10 ring determined the finishing positions. If the archers still could still not be separated then a disk toss was to be employed to decide the final order.
The elimination rounds and medal matches, held over four days from 8 to 11 August, used the Archery Olympic Round set system introduced at the 2012 Summer Olympics. Each match consisted of a maximum of five sets, with archers each shooting three arrows per set. The archer with the best score from their three arrows won the set, earning two set points. The archer with the lowest score in each set received zero set points. If the score was tied, each archer received one set point. The first archer to set six points was declared the winner. If the match was tied at five set points apiece after the maximum five sets were played, each archer shot one more arrow with the one shooting closest to centre of the target winning.
Schedule Date Time Phase Day 0 Friday 5 August 2016 13:00 Ranking round Day 3 Monday 8 August 2016 09:00-17:45 1/32 & 1/16 Eliminations Day 4 Tuesday 9 August 2016 09:00-17:45 1/32 & 1/16 Eliminations Day 5 Wednesday 10 August 2016 09:00-18:55 1/32 & 1/16 EliminationsDay 6 Thursday 11 August 2016 09:00-17:10 1/8 Eliminations Quarter-finals Semi-finals Bronze medal matchGold medal matchAll times are Brasília Time (UTC−03:00) Source:
Report Pre-event
With South Korea's long-established record of success in the women's individual event, the trio of Ki Bo-bae, Chang Hye-jin, and Choi Mi-sun entered as favourites to challenge for the gold medal. Ki and Choi in particular were tipped for victory by several observers, including commentator George Tekmitchov, compound archer Sara López, and World Archery journalist Andrea Vasquez. Jane Zorowitz of NBC predicted that Choi was Ki's biggest obstacle to retaining her Olympic title.