Archery Canada – OTTAWA (Archery Canada) – Four Canadian recurve archers competed at the first World Cup event of the 2018 season from April 23-29 in Shanghai, China, where Brian Maxwell of Vancouver achieved a solid 17th-place finish in the individual standings.

 

Archery Canada Website: www.archerycanada.ca/en

Shanghai World Cup Website: Shanghai 2018

Competing solely in men’s recurve, Canada was represented at the Shanghai 2018 Hyundai Archery World Cup by Maxwell, Crispin Duenas of Scarborough, Ont., Hamilton Nguyen of Toronto and Conner Sorley of Saskatoon.

Duenas, a three-time Olympian (2008, 2012, 2016) who finished sixth at last October’s world championships in Mexico City, was the top Canuck in the qualifying round in Shanghai, claiming 14th place thanks to his 665 points.

Nguyen (651 points) and Maxwell (645), who also participated at the 2017 world championships, took the 40th and 62nd positions, respectively, while Sorley (625), the youngest member of the Canadian squad at only 23 years of age, was 90th going into the elimination stage.

All four Canadians won their first individual elimination match but Maxwell was the only one who managed to advance past the second round, thanks to a head-to-head victory over Duenas in their second contest. The B.C. native went on to lose his third-round confrontation to Dennis Gankin of Kazakhstan in a shoot-off, ending up 17th in a field of 114 athletes.

Duenas, Nguyen and Sorley all tied for 33rd by virtue of their second-round losses.

In the team competition, Canada also exited early and tied for 17th overall following a 6-0 loss to 22nd seed Turkey in the first elimination round. The Canucks were 11th after the qualifying phase thanks to a 1,961-point tally, just two shy of the top 10.

Without much surprise, the competition was dominated by powerhouse South Korea, which captured six of 10 available gold medals over the weekend, including triumphs in the men’s individual (Kim Woojin) and team recurve events.

“Overall, I would say we underperformed as a group,” said Archery Canada High Performance Director Alan Brahmst, who accompanied the contingent along with national team coach Shawn Riggs and Leith Drury. “It’s early in the season though, and, although it did not show on the scoreboard, we learned a lot as a group in Shanghai. Our goal is to build on Shanghai and get better and better as the season progresses. We have a lot of work ahead of us to get the results we are looking for in the individual and team competitions this year.”

Shanghai was the first of four stops on the 2018 Hyundai Archery World Cup circuit, with upcoming events set for Antalya, Turkey (May 20-26), Salt Lake City, USA (June 18-24) and Berlin, Germany (July 16-22). The World Cup Finals are scheduled for Sept. 29-30 in Samsun, Turkey.

“The Pan American championships (Medellin, Colombia, Aug. 14-19) are also a big event on our 2018 schedule,” added Brahmst.

NOTES: Prior to the Shanghai World Cup, the Canadian contingent made a stop in Tokyo to visit the venues that will host the next Olympic archery events in 2020… “I think it was important to go there because now we are not going to be tourists when we go to the test event or the Olympics. We are going to go with only the goal to be really good competitors and we won’t have this desire to go exploring because we already did,” said Duenas. “We used our time there to shoot some arrows and see the Olympic sights. We did some tours around the city, went to see where the Olympic village is being built and saw the archery venue.”

 

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Archery Canada is the National Sport Organization responsible for the promotion and development of the timeless sport of archery in a safe and ethical manner. Archery Canada supports the achievement of high performance excellence in archery in all categories and the development of a national archery infrastructure to promote archery participation across Canada in cooperation with the Provincial/Territorial Archery Associations. 

 

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