Italy: Five Pole Positions in Ankara Afternoon Qualifying

At the World Archery Indoor Championships in Ankara, Italy was dominant. Over the 60-arrow qualification round, at least.

The Sultan of Smooth Sergio Pagni continued the successful seam of form he displayed in becoming the first ever Lucky Dog to win The Vegas Shoot at the end of January. A perfect 300 points in the first half followed by 297 in the second put him in pole position, joint with Mister Perfect Mike Schloesser.

“I was worried my luck had run out after Vegas,” the Sultan joked. No such luck for the rest of the field, but the defending indoor world champion wasn’t the only Italian archer to qualify high in the compound men’s competition.

“I’m happy for my teammate, Dragoni, who made 300 in the second half. We know the Italian team is close to 600 now, and it’s a way to show our potenital before the team finals!”

Luigi Dragoni landed third, a point behind Sergio over the full round.

The pair, with third Michele Nencioni, 19th ranked individually, took a comfortable top seeding in the team competition. The Italian women, meanwhile, were pipped to that first seeding by Russia, though it wasn’t the fault of leading scorer Irene Franchini.

A calm 587 from Irene, who claimed her first international individual medal – silver – at the third Indoor Archery World Cup stage of the season just finished after a number of team gongs, was enough to take pole position.

“It’s always nice to shoot in a world championships,” said Irene. “We’ll see if more nerves come in the brackets, though.”

She’ll wait another day after a bye through the first round of the eliminations, before Sergio Pagni’s scheduled opening match of the head-to-heads.

Junior archers David Pasqualucci and Tatiana Andreoli, and their respective junior recurve men’s and women’s teams, completed the Italian squad’s impressive afternoon qualifying session, all taking number one seeds.

David posted an impressive 593 points overall, five more than Turkey’s Mete Gazoz, to finish the 60 arrows in first. The 19-year-old Olympic hopeful started with a perfect 30 to take the lead and never dropped off it: “I was a bit tense at some points and I had some nines, but it was mostly okay.”

Andreoli, the junior world title holder returning to defend her crown, shot 588 for top.

She beat her first matchplay opponent, Georgia’s Marika Makharadze, in straight sets. Pasqualucci had more trouble.

“For me, the individual matches are more important,” he said. Despite struggling to pull away from his underdog opponent, Valentin Ripaux, through the first four sets of the match, David showed resilience to pull out a perfect three-arrow series in the fifth, scoring 30 and putting the Frenchman away, 6-4.

Solid starts for an Italian team now in a good position to repeat the successes of two years prior.

“The Italian team has been good this year, and you can see it in these ranks,” explained Sergio. “But the world champion title can be on the flip of a coin. It’s a single match. You have to be prepared, you have to shoot good and you have to be lucky.”

Sounds like a job, then, for the Lucky Dog!