The official practice for the archery event held at Lords Cricket Ground is London is almost over and, tomorrow, Men’s Individual Ranking Round will commence at 9am London time (3pm in Thailand). At the same time, the total score of the three team members for each country that had qualified will be added up to create the Men’s Team Ranking standings. Women archers will shoot at 1pm (7pm Bangkok). And thus, the greatest archery games ever would have begun.
Being both and archer and a writer, this year I’ve been recruited by The Guardian to be part of their Olympic Experts’ Network for Archery. It is a collaborative project between The Guardian and its readers which brings together Olympians, athletes, coaches, bloggers, and journalists from all 26 disciplines present at the Games. It has a very professional look and you can filter your interests by discipline, country or athlete. The Network will be an important part of The Guardian’s online coverage of the London Olympics.
The main focus of the page is the ever-rotating live tweets from The Guardian’s network of experts. All tweets use the #london2012 hash tag in order to filter the experts’ tweets. These will continue to appear on their website until August 17, five days after the end of the Olympic Games. The tweets are also featured on a world map, so you can see and choose your regional expert. I tweet from @vmsimandan.
Some of the experts will also be commissioned to write paid articles for the Experts’ Network Blog (similar to the pre-existing Guardian Sport Network) and, hopefully, I’ll be given the chance to write about archery in Thailand. The blog concept is part of the editor Alan Rusbridger’s vision of “an open model of journalism” which promotes a vast diversity of content to the 3 million unique visitors the The Guardian’s website attracts daily.
The four archery experts who will be tweeting the Games are Nick Kale (USA), Glen Croft (UK), Nicky Hunt (UK) and myself, Voicu Mihnea Simandan (ROM). You can check our short bios using the Filter by Expert tool or read the Who’s Who page with our longer biographies. As archery if the first in the alphabetical lists of sports, you’ll find all our details in just a beat.
To be up to date with what’s going on at the archery competition, follow me and the other Guardian Archery experts for London 2012.
