by Tyler Dyck
The women’s recurve finals on Sunday morning at the Abbotsford Ag-Rec Centre saw no shortage of drama – a word you might not normally associate with archery.
A tie in the semifinal between Elizabeth Wall and Shaelin Bishop, both with 91 points, forced a single-arrow shoot-off in which the goal was to shoot the arrow as close to the centre of the target as possible. Bishop won the shoot-off and advanced to the gold medal round where she took the top overall spot with 90 points against her Vancouver-Squamish teammate, Emma Hughes, who shot an 89.In the bronze medal match-up, Wall was paired with a teammate of her own, Carlina Oddy of the Fraser Valley Zone 3 team. A tie at 88 points would again force a single-arrow shoot-off to decide the medal winner. It would be Oddy who walked away with the third-place finish and her second bronze medal of the weekend.
“My heart was pounding.” Said Bishop when asked to recall how she felt about being forced in to a shoot off to get in to the gold medal match. “I don’t remember what was going through my head. I shot first and I knew it was a good shot, but anything could have happened.”
Teammates Bishop and Huges agreed that facing each other in the final relieved some of the pressure and that “either way we would have been happy with the outcome.”