This is part of a more complex question, which also includes many sub-questions such as: why does football get so much money? why haven’t Saudi sponsored a world archery league yet? and why can’t you bet on archery tournaments?
While the answers are also complex, in the end it’s a chicken and egg thing: our sport isn’t shown much on mainstream TV (even at the Olympics, BBC, I’m looking at you!) as we’re what’s classed as a minority sport in most countries – India and Korea being the main exceptions. This essentially means that the audience figures for coverage would be theoretically small as there’s not that many of us that do this amazing sport, and if we’re being fair, it’s not that great for the spectators.
However, earlier in the year while I sat among the 8,000 archery spectators packed into Les Invalides during Paris 2024, I started to think about why it might be that this wasn’t normal for archery – and why beyond the top tier there tends to be more judges than spectators. Chatting to some of the smart people active in other sports, I came to a few conclusions – the primary one being that the way people consume sport has changed immensely in the last 30 years, and as a sport, archery has failed to evolve to meet this trend. Take a look at coverage of a football match in the early days of the EPL versus coverage today on Sky or TNT and you’ll see what I mean – it’s a microcosm of facts and movement all designed to pique your interest for every second of the coverage. And it’s all done in less than two hours – because that’s about the most they can possibly hope to keep you for.
Even darts (or “baby throw archery” if you like) has evolved itself for the modern era with a faster-moving, match play show broken into smaller bite-size chunks that can be consumed easily. Cricket has done the same with first Twenty20 and now The Hundred short games being created. Contrast that to what just happened in Paris, where the qualification tournament was ssoooooo long and dull it didn’t even get televised. Don’t get me wrong, World Archery are looking to change this through the delivery of some great content on archery.tv but without a revolution towards match play rather than endurance, our sport will continue to struggle for views.
I don’t have the answer to this, but what I’d like to introduce is RAW Archery’s idea about what match play archery could look like. We call it ARCHERY16 and it’s a new twist on repechage with the ability to run a compressed time-frame match play competition in less than one and a half hours and provide a ranked outcome from just four rounds. Running all matches simultaneously creates constant excitement and tension – sprinkle in a little of the amazing JVD Open atmosphere and you might get to use some of the pull-out seating in the school gym that you use for shooting nights. We’ll share some ideas on streaming solutions in the coming days but they’ll be based on the same low-cost technology as our PAS solution. We’d love to hear your comments on this!
rawarchery.com 