Wijler among winners crowned Kings of Archery at JVD Open in Eindhoven

Steve Wijler, Laurena Villard, Paul Tedford and Sabine Sauter took individual titles at the 2018 Kings of Archery Series: JVD Open, held in Eindhoven, Netherlands on 17-18 November.

Ranked the world’s number one recurve man for much of the year, until overtaken by Korea’s Lee Woo Seok in October, Wijler beat Italy’s former world champion Michele Frangilli and Belgium’s Senna Roos in the last arrows of the recurve men’s final.

“I’m really happy to win this tournament because I’ve never won Kings of Archery before and this was definitely one on my bucket list,” said Wijler.

Kings of Archery was founded in 2011 and expanded with the support of Netherlands-based archery distributor JVD in 2018. The tournament uses an unusual Vegas Shoot-style, 90-arrow qualification format. Unlike Vegas, recurve archers score the whole gold as 10.

Wijler was one of two recurve archers, with Dutch teammate Sjef van den Berg, to score the perfect 900.

“It’s a lot of fun but you have to still try to shoot the normal 10 because otherwise you have way more chance to shoot an eight,” said Steve.

The top eight scorers in each category – or all 900-point shooters, if there is more than eight – advance to the finals, along with a joker picked from those that didn’t qualify in a single-arrow shoot-off.

“I like this kind of final. It is way different to shooting head-to-head,” said Wijler. 

“You are now shooting against seven others instead of one, so you can’t make any mistakes. It’s what makes it fun.”

France’s Laurena Villard beat out Olympic silver medallist Lisa Unruh and Youth Olympian Laura van der Winkel to the recurve women’s title.

The USA’s Paul Tedford and Sabine Sauter of Germany won the compound men’s and compound women’s competitions.

Tedford’s win came in the first year that more than eight compound men scored a perfect round. He, Jean Philippe Boulch, Steve Anderson, Braden Gellenthien, Domagoj Buden, Dave Cousins, Stephan Hansen, Mike Schloesser, Patrick Laursen and Sebastian Hamdorf all finished clean for a total of 10 maximum scorers over the 90-arrow qualification.

Compound archers use the same scoring system as the Vegas Shoot, the last event of the indoor season in February, at Kings of Archery; the recurve (four-centimetre) ring scores as 10.

The next major indoor event is the GT Open, the first event on the Indoor Archery World Series, taking place in Strassen, Luxembourg on 24-25 November.

People