Archery set for crucial ranking day

Four disciplines will shoot in the morning, three in the afternoon. All 140 archers will shoot 72 arrows over the course of their session.   The ranking round is used to establish the order athletes will appear in the matrix for the head-to-head rounds. Unlike the qualification round in other archery competitions, where the field of competitors is reduced after the first day, no athlete will be eliminated from the competition on the basis of their ranking score. The seeding from the ranking round will only determine who faces who for the next stage in competition. Having a good ranking round simply gives an athlete the best possible route to the final, but with the new sets-based competition format introduced since Beijing, no match is predictable.   In the morning session it will be recurve men W1/W2, recurve men standing, compound men W1 and compound women open. Archers from all four disciplines will shoot simultaneously, using 27 targets, each at a distance of 70 metres.   In recurve men W1/W1 all eyes will be on Iranian archer Ebrahim RANJBARKIVAJ, world ranked No. 1 after winning gold at the 2011 World Archery Para Championships in Turin. Beijing gold medallist CHENG Changjie (CHN) will be looking to retain his Paralympic title so the scores should be high and the top spot hotly contested.   In a field boasting 15 competing countries, the recurve men standing category is wide open. DONG Zhi (CHN), who placed fifth in Beijing after being a competition favourite, will be looking to improve on his 2008 performance but world record holder and world No. 1 Timur TUCHINOV (RUS) may stand between DONG and the top rank.   It looks set to be a tight shoot-off in the compound men W1 discipline, with the relatively small field of 12 athletes including all three medallists from Beijing. David DRAHONINSKY (CZE), gold medal winner from 2008 and silver medallist from the 2011 world championships, will be hoping to outshoot his fellow Beijing medallists John CAVANAGH (GBR), who won silver, and Jeff FABRY (USA), 2008 bronze medallist and world record holder.   Compound women open favourite and world No. 1 Danielle BROWN (GBR) will shoot alongside teammates Pippa BRITTON and Mel CLARKE, making up a quarter of the similarly small field of 12 athletes. The Great Britain archers will be facing challenging opposition from the Russian quadrant with all three of their archers in this discipline, Stepanida ARTAKHINOVA, Marina LYZHNIKOVA and Olga POLEGAEVA, placing within the top 10 world rankings.   In the afternoon session, the ranking range opens its targets for the recurve women standing and W1/W2 disciplines, as well as the compound men open.   The recurve women standing competition will be fierce, with Beijing gold and silver medallists, LEE Hwa Sook (KOR) and GAO Fangxia (CHN) respectively taking to the range. However Switzerland's Magali COMTE, ranked world No. 1, will be striving to lead from the front with a first place ranking going into the head-to-heads.   In the recurve women W1/W1 event Turkey's archers will be hoping for a strong result, with world ranked No. 1 Ozlem Hacer KALAY and No. 2 Hatice BAYAR taking aim.   Making up the third discipline of the afternoon's session, the compound men open will include 28 archers from 17 countries vying for the best position going into the head-to-head round. Paralympic debutant, Matt STUTZMAN (USA) is expected to start his Paralympic Games career with a high score after missing out on the world record for 72 arrows by two points in 2011 (the record stands at 701).   Team rankings will also be decided on the back of the ranking rounds. The scores of the three individual athletes for each team will be added together to create a team total. Similarly to the individual competition, these team totals will be used to rank the teams and place them into the head-to-head matrix.   Source: PNS Edited by World Archery Communication