December 9 was the day when the individual matches at the Indoor Archery World Cup took place. It was also my last day in Singapore. I woke up early, recharged after a good night’s sleep and energized after scoring a new personal record during the first day of the World Cup.
The practice for all the participating divisions started at 8am so I was in the lobby of my hotel very early in the morning to check out of my room, then grabbed something to eat and made my way to the ITE East College where the Indoor Cup was taking place.
Unlike the day before, we all started shooting on time and by 9:30am I was already on the shooting line in my 1/16 elimination round. My first match was against Yotov Ivan of Bulgaria whose total score during the qualification round so happened to be just two points below mine. It was to be a tight match, but I was confident as I had already achieved an immense personal win the day before. So I had noting to lose but everything to win.
I shot extremely well and finished the first end with 29 points against Ivan’s 26. 2 points went my way. Ivan recovered and shot a perfect score of 30 points in the second end but I didn’t let him take the round and matched his feat. We both got 1 point. I had the advantage 3-1. I won the next end too with 28-26 and brought my overall score to 5-1. Ivan didn’t give up without a fight and shot another perfect 10 to my 10, 9, 9 and reduced his handicap to 5-3. I didn’t panic and concentrated on my every shot. I knew that if I’d lost the next round, we’d have gone to a one-arrow shoot off. I needed a tie or a win to take the match. I finished with three 10s against Ivan’s 25 points and thus I won my first international match in a world cup by 7-3.
We shook hands and Ivan wished me good luck. I was to shoot in the 1/8 elimination round against first seed Chang Shu Chieh of Chinese Taipei who managed a whopping 589 points (out of 600 possible) in the qualification round the previous day.
I waited patiently for the recurve women to shoot in their 1/16 and then for the compound men and women to shoot the 1/8. I was not excited at all and felt the day started well so I had to continue shooting well. At 11am I picked up my bow, waited for the signal and stepped on the shooting line. I shot well against the Chinese Taipei archer but not well enough. He won the first 2 points 30-29 and then shot another perfect score against my 28 points. By then it was already 4-0 and my opponent hadn’t shot a single arrow outside the 10-point ring.
What I found intimidating was the fact that Chang Shu Chieh was a very fast archer. By the time I was setting up my bow for the second shot, he had already finished shooting all his three arrows. And when you see that he had managed a perfect score and I already had a 9, I new that the round was over. But I still fought on and shot well. In our last end, the Chinese shot 29 but I was able to shoot only 27 points. He won the match 6-0.
I was not disappointed for my loss as, overall, I had a very good performance at theis World Cup. Chang went on to shoot in the 1/4 losing to Denis Gankin of Kazakhstan 6-2, who then won the bronze medal.
I spent the rest of the day sightseeing and then returned to the archery venue for the recurve men gold medal match.
It was a good day for archery!
