By Felicity May
The 2024 World Field Championships were hosted by Lakeland Archery Club in Lac La Biche, Alberta, Canada from September 16 to September 22 – a beautiful setting of vast woodlands, fields, and we even got a glimpse of the Northern Lights – but unfortunately no moose or bears.
Results
In the men’s recurve division, Olympic silver medallist Brady Ellison emerged victorious after a stunning final with Ryan Tyack, displaying incredible precision and focus throughout the competition. In the women’s recurve event the 2023 European U21 field champion, Roberta Di Francesco took the gold against Gaby Schloesser.
The compound categories were equally competitive, with Mike Schloesser and Paige Pearce taking the top spots in the men’s and women’s divisions respectively. Their finals were spectacular, and both richly deserved their wins.
In barebow Cesar Vera Bringas of Spain took the gold in the men’s competition against fan favourite Erik Jonsson, while Fawn Girard of USA won in the women’s event.
The Championships also had U21 divisions for all bow styles. In the U21 barebow men, GBR Oliver Hicks took silver to Sweden’s Ludvig Rohlin in a stunning final. With four competitors in the U21 barebow women, they did not get to shoot on the finals field, but on the qualification/match targets. Barbara Feltre of Italy took the Championship title against USA’s Jaelyn Coleman. Their awards were presented at the dinner rather than at the final’s venue.
U21 recurves showed their high calibre with Romanian Nectarios Condurache claiming gold in the men with just a 1-point lead and Italian Lucia Mosna in the women by a decisive 8 points. U21 compound men went to Dewey Hathaway of USA and Jaqueline Ringström of Sweden in the women’s event.
Inside the Championships
Lakeland Archery Club promoted the event on social media, and demonstrated the time and effort that went into peripheral necessities – shrubbery cutting, building walkways, building the purpose-built high stands – which all definitely paid off.
You might imagine that the World Championships would be held on a particularly difficult course, with steep hills, cross slopes, long and short difficulties. But the Lac la Biche course is actually pretty flat, though the light and dark areas could present a problem. The club put an awful lot of time and effort into the World Championships by erecting purpose-built towers to shoot off and up to, giving a different element of flat footing and aiming up or down. Being a flat course, it did give the extra element of having to stay switched on for every single arrow because the scores were incredibly high. One bad arrow could (and did) cost you the cut. And the light and dark on the course definitely played with some people, along with whether to cut or not shooting off the towers, a lot of people did end up cutting too much and paid the price.
There was one shot on the first day recurve course that caught a lot of people out. The target before was a short flat 80cm face, followed by a long uphill 80cm face, but because of the short one, a lot of people thought surely not another 80cm and set up for a 60cm, obviously resulting in a bad target. However, due to the targets being danage (domino, not layered foam) on that course, if archers were observant, it was obvious what face it was.
There was one stand out recurve archer, which of course was Brady Ellison. He shot a 399 on the unmarked day, 15 points ahead of second rank, which doesn’t necessarily show how flat the course was, but it just solidifies how incredible he is as an archer, not just at target archery but all forms of archery.
The finals brought such an element of beauty on the golf course, looking out towards Lac La Biche Lake. It was incredibly picturesque! The final shot was raised high on a crane, and did look amazing. Aiming up at a target with no backdrop must have been quite disorientating!
Rumour has it that an American youth archer was caught with a phone whilst out on the course, which ended in a disqualification, followed by an appeal, which resulted in him being reinstated, which of course knocked out another archer, a Canadian. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall!
Outside of the event, the bus service was excellent, which is almost unheard of at these events – so a massive thank you to the bus staff who worked tirelessly around the clock for the staff and athletes. Each night there was a different event – one night there was even a rodeo!
All in all, an incredibly well-run event by the events committee of Lac La Biche, and a special thank you goes to Rene Schaub who opened his home and community up to World Archery, and to all of the competitors and staff. Rene even worked on his birthday, where on the final night of the event, everyone sang happy birthday to him!
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