Anyone who competes knows the line: I shoot well in training and fall apart in competition. Sometimes it is one end that slips away in a head-to-head match, sometimes a whole competition, sometimes weeks in which the arrows no longer go where they used to. The research literature calls all of this choking, falling apart under pressure, and in recent years a few researchers have started asking archers about it directly: how often it has happened, how long it lasted and who it happens to most.
The answers are recent and fragile. Two surveys in two countries find that most competitive archers say they have been through it. Those who go through it more often tend to dwell on their mistakes, while those who can step back from their own thoughts go through it less often, but the links are small and were collected with questionnaires at a single moment. And when you look at the scores from competitions actually shot, the drop on the deciding arrow is about 1%.
What counts as falling apart
The first problem is the word. In sport psychology, choking is performing below your own level when the competition matters; the studies on archers, though, asked about it, each in its own way. A British survey asked competitors whether they had ever had a dramatic drop in performance that was out of their control, a wording broad enough to cover an end lost in a final and a season that went badly. An Italian study, on the other hand, asked how many choking episodes there had been over the previous six months and how long each had lasted, counted in training sessions: here an episode is not a moment in a competition but a period of crisis.
Alongside choking sits target panic, which archers know well: the aim that will not settle on the centre, the release that goes early or will not go at all. The two are often confused, and the only survey that counted both in the same people, 155 competitors split between archers and golfers, helps to separate them. Of those who had had target panic, or the yips in golf, 72% had also choked in competition; of those who had not, 65%. That overlap is only slightly higher than you would expect if the two travelled independently, and 11% of the sample had had target panic or the yips without ever choking. This is why the registry lists as reported that those who have had target panic report choking only slightly more often than the rest. Target panic has an article of its own; this one is about choking.
How common it is
Among the 69 archers in the British survey, all competing at county level or above, 75.4% say they have at least once had a dramatic drop in performance out of their control, against 61.6% of the 86 golfers. Across the whole sample, archers and golfers together, those who report it do not differ in age or in years spent at their highest level. The Italian study, of 115 competitors licensed in Lazio and aged 10 to 74, gives a denser picture: an average of three episodes over the previous six months, from one to seven, each lasting six training sessions on average, and 34 of the 115 say they are in the middle of one as they fill in the questionnaire.
The two figures point the same way, and the claim that most competitive archers say they have fallen apart in competition at least once is reported. It goes no higher because of how the counting is done: respondents decide for themselves whether the label fits, recall stretches back years, and in the Italian sample nobody reports zero episodes, so either the definition was very wide or the random selection of participants did not survive recruitment at the competitions.
What the scores show
Neither survey sets the accounts against scorecards, and the few studies that have looked at scores under pressure find small effects. An analysis of 2,210 international head-to-head matches decided by a shoot-off between 2013 and 2019 compares each archer with themselves: the deciding arrow is worth on average 1.1% less than their own average in the first set of the same match, and at the top that means 9.148 points on average in the sets and 9.088 in the shoot-off. The claim that archers score less with the shoot-off arrow than in the rest of the match is reported, because there is a single study, and the same study sees the drop in men and not in women, without the difference between the two drops reaching significance: the drop shows up in men and not in women.
Another archive, 19,122 arrows from recurve head-to-head matches across three Olympic Games, the 2021 World Championships and a European Grand Prix, shows where the drop is clearest. After two arrows outside the 10, the third is worth about 12% less than after two 10s, for everyone. In that situation women recover less: the men's third arrow is worth 3.5% more than the women's, while overall the last arrow of the end does not separate the sexes: the claim that after two arrows outside the 10, elite women archers recover less than men is reported on a single observational study. Within an end, of course, the archer also knows how the match is going, so the run of previous arrows and the pressure of the score cannot be pulled apart.
Away from head-to-head matches the signal is fainter still: in the few groups whose accuracy was measured both in training and in competition, almost all kyudo practitioners and very small samples, nobody found a systematic drop, and the one result the other way, three Korean women archers, concerns only the first competition of the season. The registry marks as reported that accuracy does not drop in competition compared with practice. That comparison is covered in do archers shoot worse in competition than in training? None of this takes anything away from the episodes archers report, because one person's collapse can disappear into the average of everyone else.
Who chokes more often
Here the richest work is the Italian study, which gave its 115 archers a battery of questionnaires on anxiety, rumination, responses to stress, attention to oneself and to others, and coach support. The figure lines up how closely each measure is linked to the number of episodes reported.
The most consistent link is with rumination, the thinking that keeps returning to doubts and to the fear of failing. Both studies find it: in the British one, those who report choking score higher on concern over mistakes, 2.47 against 1.89 among the archers, and on doubts about their own actions, with the comparisons run on archers and golfers together; in the Italian one, rumination is one of three factors that predict how often archers choke. This is why the claim that archers who ruminate on mistakes choke more often in competition is reported, and no more: both studies measure choking and rumination at the same moment and cannot say which comes first.
Whether dwelling on mistakes already made also goes with lower scores is less clear. In a study of 188 archers in the United States, that thought was the mental item most strongly linked to the season's average score, with a correlation of −0.51 among the 80 with complete data; in fifty young Malaysian archers, by contrast, freedom from worry, a related measure aimed more at mistakes still to come than at those already made, was the only mental skill that did not separate those who shot better. The claim that archers who dwell on past mistakes shoot lower scores is contested.
Anxiety felt in the body, meaning nervousness, tension and a racing heart, is linked to choking with a correlation of 0.24, worth about 6% of the differences between one archer and another. In the model the authors use to predict choking, however, somatic anxiety does not appear: together with the other two forms of anxiety it feeds rumination, and it is rumination that sits next to the episodes. The claim that archers who feel their anxiety in the body choke more often in competition is therefore reported on a single study, which its own authors call exploratory. How much anxiety weighs on the score is covered in the article on competition anxiety.
On the weight of other people's gaze the two studies disagree. In the Italian sample, archers more concerned with the image they give others report slightly more episodes; in the British survey the same scale, with the two sports taken together, does not separate those who have choked from those who have not, and among the archers alone the averages, 3.08 against 2.66, lean the way of the claim without a test to check it. The claim that archers more concerned with how others see them choke more often in competition is therefore contested. The same goes for personality: in the British survey archers who have choked describe themselves as less conscientious, 3.80 against 4.38 on a scale of one to five, but among archers with target panic there is no difference, 3.92 against 3.96, so the claim that archers who choke, and those who get the yips, come out less conscientious is contested too.
On the other side of the figure are the measures that go with fewer episodes. Archers who can step back from their own thoughts report fewer, and this is another of the three factors in the model. Those who meet stress by returning to the task also report fewer and, above all, ruminate much less, with a correlation of −0.58: the claim that archers who cope with stress by focusing on the task choke less often in competition is reported. Two limits apply to the whole study. Everyone reports at least one episode, so the comparison is between those who choke less often and those who choke more often; and the factors in the model together explain 19.3% of the differences in how often archers choke, 17.2% once adjusted, which leaves more than four fifths of what separates one archer from another unaccounted for.
When you feel you have to win
A specific idea goes round the shooting line: you fall apart in the competitions you feel you have to win, more than in the hard ones. The only direct evidence is the case of a 44-year-old archer with a national ranking, whose dips came in the competitions she considered easiest, indoors, at short distances and against less experienced opponents, while outdoors and against stronger archers she shot better. After seven sessions of rational emotive behaviour therapy over three months, aimed at her most rigid beliefs, her competition average rose from 75.6% to 84.9% of the maximum score, comparing nine competitions before and nine after. It is one person, though, reconstructed largely from her own account and with no stable baseline, so the improvement cannot be put down to the intervention.
The British survey adds a sideways clue: archers who report choking also report more expectations from their parents, 2.32 against 1.86. Those are other people's expectations rather than the sense of having to win, and a questionnaire collected afterwards cannot say which comes first. The claim that an archer falls apart when they feel they have to win, not when the competition is hard remains reported on the single case.
The coach behind the line
The third factor in the Italian model is the coach support archers perceive in competition: those who feel supported report fewer episodes, with a weight of −0.23 in the authors' regression. What counts is support in competition, not in training, and taken on its own the link is weak, −0.15, so much so that, with the calculation redone on 115 archers, it falls short of the significance the study gives it. Archers who prefer training in a group also feel more supported, so the kind of archer may matter more than what the coach does, and an archer who chokes often may also remember the coach as less present.
Eight South Korean Olympic archers, interviewed about their relationship with their coaches, say that the manner matters as much as the presence. After a seven in the middle of a run of tens, calm, personal encouragement helps, a few words about how they shoot when they shoot at their best. A supportive phrase repeated from behind the line during a team final, by contrast, distracts, and an angry or visibly anxious coach knocks their confidence. Choking was not measured in that study, so the claim that coach support during competition reduces choking is reported on the Italian association alone, and nobody has tested an effect.
Archers and other sports
You hear it said that archery teaches you to handle pressure. The only comparison comes from India: 180 boys aged 11 to 13, thirty from each of six individual sports, took a laboratory stress tolerance test. On correct responses, missed stimuli and reaction times the six sports were the same, and on incorrect responses the archers' only difference was with swimming, in a direction the paper does not make clear. The claim that on a stress tolerance test, young archers do no better than peers from other sports is reported. It concerns preadolescents in a laboratory, not holding up through a qualification round.
Where the research stops
The measurements on people come almost entirely from two questionnaires and a single case, with two different definitions of choking. All of them are snapshots, and the questions archers care about most remain open. Nobody has followed archers over time to see whether those who ruminate more go on to choke, or ruminate because they are already in an episode; nobody has set reported episodes against the same person's scores; and nobody has tried to reduce choking by working on rumination, with a control group. The closest data come from 23 university archers: after eight mindfulness sessions over four weeks their emotional rumination fell from 3.29 to 2.40, but the study had no comparison group and did not look at competitions.
What I take to the shooting line
These studies do not say how to avoid choking. They say that it happens to many archers, that it weighs less on average scores than it feels, and that the people it happens to most often share, above all, a way of living with their mistakes. I draw three points from them, and none has been tested in an experiment on choking.
The first is to name precisely what is happening. An end lost in a match, a whole competition below your level and weeks in which the shot will not come back are three different things, and target panic is another thing again. Noting in a logbook when it happens and what you were thinking just before shows, after a few months, whether the episodes come in the hard competitions or, as for the archer in the single case, in the ones you felt you had to win.
The second concerns the arrow after a mistake. The most consistent link in both surveys is between choking and rumination, and in the competition archives the sharpest drop is on the third arrow after two outside the 10. A pre-shot routine that starts again from scratch with every arrow, with a gesture or a word that brings attention back to the task, is the most direct way I know of not carrying the last arrow into the next one. The data are correlations, though, and nobody has measured whether a routine reduces choking.
The third concerns the coach. Since in the Olympic archers' accounts it was the manner that made the difference, it makes sense to agree before the competition what to say in difficult moments and what to avoid: a few calm words about how the archer shoots when shooting well, rather than encouragement repeated from behind the line. And if an episode lasts weeks and does not pass, the sensible step is to work on it with your coach and, when needed, with a sport psychologist, using the logbook as common ground.