Archery at the 2012 Summer Olympics

The Archery events at the 2012 Summer Olympics is scheduled to be held over an eight day period from 27 July to 3 August. Four events will be held, and all events shall take place at Lord's Cricket Ground in London in front of a temporary stand built to accommodate 6,500 spectators.

Competition Format

128 athletes shall compete across the four medal events: Men's Individual, Women's Individual, Men's Team and Women's Team.^[1]

All four events shall be recurve archery events, and shall be held under the FITA-approved 70-metre distance and rules. An initial ranking round involving all 128 archers shall take place, before competitors move on to the 'Olympic round', which will be played in a tournament or single elimination format in each event. In each individual event, all 64 archers of each gender shall participate; in each team competition, there shall be a field of 12 teams, each consisting of three archers.

The ranking round will be used to seed both individual and team events, the latter by aggregating the individual scores for the members of each team; from there, the Olympic round will be conducted in tournament, single-elimination format where one loss will eliminate the competitor, save for the semifinals. In that round, the losers will move on to bronze medal competition; the winners will move on to compete for the gold medal.

Individual events

In the individual events, all 64 competitors shall enter the competition at the first round, the round of 64.

Team events

In the team events, the top four seeded teams from the ranking round shall receive a bye to the quarter-final round. The remaining eight teams, seeded 5th to 12th, shall compete for the remaining four places in the quarterfinal round.

Schedule

Qualification

Each National Olympic Committee (NOC) can enter a maximum of 6 competitors, 3 per each gender. Where an NOC has earned a full quota of 3 competitors in a particular gender category, those three competitors shall, in addition to competing in the individual event, compete together for their NOC in the team event. It is anticipated that 12 NOCs shall qualify to participate in each team event, thus qualifying 3 athletes each (24 in total) for the corresponding individual event. All other NOCs may earn a maximum of 1 quota place per gender for the individual events. ^[2]

6 places are reserved for Great Britain as host nation, and a further 6 shall be decided upon by the Tripartite Commission. The remaining 116 places shall therefore be allocated through a qualification process, in which archers earn quota places for their respective NOCs, though not necessarily for themselves. ^[2]

To be eligible to participate in the Olympic Games after the NOC has obtained a quota place, all archers must have achieved the following Minimum Qualification Score (MQS): ^[2]

• Men: FITA round of 1230 or 70m round of 625
• Women: FITA round of 1230 or 70m round of 600

The MQS must be achieved between 2nd July 2011 (starting at the 2011 World Outdoor Archery Championships) and 1 July 2012 at a registered FITA event. ^[2]

References