But archery in general is an interesting sport to show in slow motion. Caused by the fracture of a second that decides about a perfect in-death-center ten or lousy 7 points in archery, it is always nice to see what is actually going on in this crucial instant of time. As men is not able to see it, people in archery around the world have put effort in slow motion videos over and over again. One of the most famous footage was produced by Werner Beiter whose videos from the movie “Der Weg ins Zentrum” (The way to center) are still available for download. In 1997, he opened the “Werner & Iris Center” in Dauchingen, Germany where top athletes from all over the world have the possibility to practise and improve their shooting with the help of slow motion video. The visitor gallery of the “Werner & Iris Center” is basically a who’s is who of international archery and shows how important slow motion video footage is for high-level archery.

Some days ago I found nice slow motion videos made by former U.S. Olympic Archery Team Coach Lloyd Brown at youtube. He also specialised in high speed video analysis and was not just able to produce this footage under “laboratory conditions” but live, at the practise field during the Archery World Championships 2007 in Leipzig. These videos show archers like Natalia Valeeva of Italy or Sung-Hyun Park of Korea and are awesome shots:

http://www.archeryimages.net/gallery/index.php?action=pictures&cid=375

To present you one example, here is a video showing Natalia Valeeva:

Archery is a very open sport when it comes to disabled persons. As far as I know, it is the only Olympic Sport where disabled persons can (successfully) compete with “normal” athletes. This is valid for physically disabled persons as well as for mentally disabled ones. A good example for such a disabled athlete is the German Mario Oehme, who won the Paralympic Games 1996 and 2004. He has been in a wheelchair after a mining accident in the 1980s and is in the German Paralympic National Team since 1993. But he is one of the archers that is actually able to compete against non-disabled archers and defeat them on a very high level. He proved that on several German Championships in the past.

Even though those positive examples can be role models for others, it should not distract us from the fact that disabled archers have often a lot of problems to struggle with. Archers in wheelchairs are quite common nowadays, but some archers have to deal with more difficult handicaps like blindness or absent extremities either from birth defects or accidents. There are some good examples of how these people deal with their handicap and doing archery anyway. These pictures are taken at the World Archery Para Championships 2009 in Nymburk (CZE):

Finally, the video of the armless archer. In my opinion, it is an extreme example of what is possible if there is a will. I have never seen somebody doing archery with a comparable handicap and moreover, this guy here is doing quite good.

Edit: Yesterday, at January 12th, Andrew Leibs published a good article called “Archery for the Blind”. If you are interested in such things and if you want to learn more about the possibilities for disabled persons to do archery, this might be a good start for you:

http://accessibletravel.suite101.com/article.cfm/archery_for_the_blind