Antalya hosted the first international tournament since before the COVID-19 pandemic in early October.
The past six months should have been chock full of competition – not to mention the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games – but instead we have been isolating, socially distancing and patiently waiting for international archery to return to something resembling normalcy. This year’s pandemic has undoubtedly been awful, for many people and in many ways, and it’s not over yet. While the world adjusts to the working reality of life with COVID-19, archery must, too – and the sport made a grand leap toward that future by holding its first international event since the start of the calendar hiatus in March. Antalya hosted 107 archers from 13 countries for a three-day world ranking tournament on 2-4 October 2020. It is a small number when compared to prepandemic international tournaments. But it was also a manageable number for an event that was testing new protocols to protect the well-being of everyone in attendance. Andrea Marcos, Lukasz Przybylski, Magdalena Smialkowska and Artem Makhnenko took the individual titles, adding some decent points to their world ranking totals, too. So from a purely sporting perspective – arrows were shot, medals were won. But Antalya’s success will need to be measured on more than just that.