"I'm calm in qualification, and in the matches my legs shake." Plenty of archers say it, and anyone who competes will recognise it. The seventy-two qualification arrows are shot on the line alongside everyone else, and the score builds slowly; in head-to-head matches there is an opponent beside you, the arrows are often shot alternately, the match score changes after every end and whoever loses is out. On the field it gets summed up like this: in qualification you shoot against the target, in the matches against the opponent. Another idea almost always follows, that the pressure in the matches is of a different order and that this is where competitions are lost.
The measurements help to pull apart three questions that usually arrive together. The first is whether archers are more anxious before the matches than before qualification: there is one field study, and it says they are. The second is whether arrows get worse under pressure, and official competition results answer with a small drop in one specific situation, the shoot-off, and no measurable effect in the other situations that have been examined. The third is whether the knockout format produces upsets, and here the answer depends less on the archers' minds than on the number of arrows.
What changes when the matches start
The difference between the two phases is not only the opponent. In qualification the score adds up over seventy-two arrows and produces a ranking: a bad end costs a few places, but the competition goes on. In the matches the count starts again from zero and, in recurve, sets are three arrows each: the set system turns every end into a small verdict, with two set points for winning the set, one each for a tie, and the match to whoever reaches six first. I have written about how this way of counting can make an archer who scored more lose the match in a separate article; what matters here is the effect on the mind, because every arrow weighs on a much shorter total and a mistake shows on the scoreboard straight away.
Qualification is not weightless either. It sets the bracket, that is, who meets whom in the first round, and in analyses of international results medals almost always go to archers who finish qualification in the top 20, a claim the registry holds as reported. In many competitions qualification also makes a cut, and anyone who misses the bracket goes home. That difference will matter shortly, because the only study that compared the two phases was carried out at a competition where qualification eliminated nobody.
Anxiety measured before each phase
The study comes from the 2011 Asian Championships in Tehran. Fifty-seven recurve archers from national squads, twenty-eight men and twenty-nine women, answered two questions five to ten minutes before each phase: how worried they felt and how activated they felt, each on a scale from one to nine. Both questions come from a sport psychology instrument, the Sport Grid-Revised, split into two scales because at a tournament of that level the archers had only moments to respond and not all of them read English well. There were three phases: qualification, the individual matches and the team event.
Cognitive anxiety, meaning worry, went from 3.67 before qualification to 5.21 before the individual matches and 5.05 before the team event, a clear effect of phase. It rose in the same way in men and women: the women reported more anxiety than the men in all three phases, but the gap between the two groups did not change significantly from one phase to the next. Felt arousal, on the other hand, did not move, and stayed high from qualification through to the team event.
The figure that stays still matters as much as the one that rises. That archers are more aroused in competition than in practice the registry holds as corroborated, on three independent samples of archers; in Tehran, though, qualification was already competition, and arousal was high from the start. What changed when the matches began was worry, not the feeling of being switched on. It is the authors who read that worry as pressure, attributing it to the higher stakes of the knockout phase.
On the strength of this study the registry holds as reported the claim that head-to-head matches put more pressure on archers than the qualification round, and gives the same status to a narrower one, that elite archers' anxiety rises from qualification to the matches and stays high in the team event. Reported and no more, for three reasons. The first is that it is a single study, at a single competition, with a single question for each dimension. The second is the format: at that championship all sixty-four men and forty-nine women in the individual recurve event went through to the matches regardless, because qualification only set the brackets, so the comparison is between a phase in which nobody was eliminated and a knockout phase. The third is the order: qualification always comes first, so anxiety that simply grew as the days of the tournament went by would produce the same result. On top of all this, nobody looked at the scores, so the study tells us how worried the archers were and not how they shot.
What archers say
Before that measurement there were only archers' own words, and they point the same way. Three eighteen-year-olds from the South Korean reserve national squad, interviewed for a mental training study, named among their most tense moments the first round of the bracket, the first end of the matches after qualification and being level with the opponent; one of them, though, also mentioned the first end of the competition. Ten years later eight archers from the South Korean Olympic team, interviewed one by one, listed the shoot-off and shots that drag on because the archer is undecided about their technique among their moments of crisis.
These are accounts from eleven people, gathered without asking them to compare the phases of a competition, so in the registry they remain context and do not move the status. They do help to name the moments, though, because they do not point to the knockout phase as a whole but to particular points within it: entering the bracket, being level, the single arrow.
Arrows under pressure, within the match
If worry rises, the next question is whether the arrows suffer, and here the measurements come from somewhere else: not from a questionnaire but from World Archery's official results. The first study took the head-to-head matches of 120 competitions between 2013 and 2019, from the Olympics down to national events, and isolated 2,210 matches settled by a shoot-off, with 3,645 shoot-off arrows from adult recurve and compound archers. The comparison is made within the same archer: their shoot-off arrow against their own average in the first set of the same match.
The deciding arrow scores 1.1% less, a difference that with those numbers chance does not explain and that holds even when the lowest scores are removed. The values are small, though, because at the top level archers average just over nine: 9.148 points in the sets and 9.088 in the shoot-off. That is why the registry holds as reported that archers score less with the shoot-off arrow than in the rest of the match: the design suits the question, but there is only one study.
The same study also checked whether the round matters, and the answer is no. Compared with shoot-offs in earlier rounds, those in the quarter-finals, the semi-finals and the final score no lower, and none of the three differences can be told apart from zero. A second study, of 6,374 three-arrow sets from the individual recurve matches at three Olympic Games, the 2021 World Championships and a European Grand Prix, reaches a similar conclusion for the last arrow of the set: when losing the set means losing the match, the third arrow scores fractionally less than in sets with nothing riding on them, but no difference is significant.
Split by sex, the drops do not fall on the same people. Compared with the first set, the shoot-off arrow drops for men and not for women, although the direct comparison between the two drops does not reach significance. At world-level events, as the next section shows, the reverse happens.
Big events and the deciding arrow
The idea that the more a competition matters, the worse the deciding arrow is shot is widely held, and on this the two studies of official results point in opposite directions. In the first, for the same archer, a shoot-off arrow at a World Cup, the World Championships or the 2016 Olympics scores 0.9% less than one at continental and national events, which is less than a tenth of a point; split by sex, the drop belongs to the women, minus 2.3%, while for the men it is not significant. In the second, the last arrow of the set scores more at the Olympics than at the other two events, by a clear margin.
The two measures are not the same thing, because a shoot-off is a single arrow shot with the scores level and the last arrow of a set is not. Neither study separates the importance of the competition from the level of the archers who reach it, either, and the field at an Olympic Games is not the field at a Grand Prix. That is why the claim that the more important the competition, the worse the decisive arrow is shot is contested: there is one result for it and one against, on two different measures.
Upsets in the bracket
There is another reason the matches feel harsher than qualification, and it has nothing to do with the mind. A head-to-head match is decided over a handful of arrows, and a handful of arrows can overturn an order that seventy-two arrows had established. An analysis of the brackets at the first World Cup stage of 2013 found that the higher-ranked archer usually wins and that upsets show up mainly around places 32 and 56, where the bracket pairs archers with neighbouring rankings; the authors put this down precisely to the small number of arrows. A model by the same author, checked against 182 major international competitions from 2000 to 2014, reaches the same conclusion by calculation: when abilities are close and scores moderate, the stronger archer has only a small advantage. At the 2012 Olympics, in the men's recurve, nine archers ranked between 33rd and 64th won their first match, in line with the 8.1 the model expected.
The 2013 study, though, also shows the other side. At that year's World Championships the matches were shot in gusts measured at over 20 metres per second, and in the recurve the top twenty or so from qualification held on regardless, while in the compound many low-ranked archers finished high, which means upsets between archers far apart in the ranking. That is why the claim that in head-to-head matches, upsets happen when the two archers are of similar level is contested: the direct evidence is a reading of the charts in a single study, it points two ways, and nobody has counted upsets with a stated definition.
The study of the 6,374 sets adds a detail that explains why matches so often feel finely balanced. In international brackets the two archers are almost always close, with an average ratio between their qualification scores of 1.002 and a standard deviation of 0.057, and according to the authors that ratio is the variable that weighs most on the last arrow of the set. When two archers are alike, the outcome of a set system match stays uncertain because of how the format is built, and it is the same mechanism that takes so many matches to five-all.
Where the research stops
Taken together, these studies answer different parts of the question and none answers all of it. Anxiety has been measured before the phases, but nobody has set it beside the arrows of the same competition, that is, an archer's worry before a match next to the score in that match. Scores have been measured within matches, but not compared with the same archers' qualification. And the only comparison between phases comes from a competition in which qualification eliminated nobody, so the question, in the form an archer at risk of missing the bracket would ask it, has not been put to the test.
There is also a distinction the data make necessary: more reported anxiety does not necessarily mean worse arrows. In the official results the measured drop concerns the shoot-off arrow and amounts to a few hundredths of a point, the stakes of the set alone do not move the last arrow, and the round of the bracket adds nothing. An archer who leaves a match convinced that tension made them shoot badly may be right about that match, but the competition data available show no general collapse under pressure.
What I take from it for the shooting line
The first thing I take from it concerns how to read the shaking legs. Among the national squad archers in Tehran, worry rose when the matches began, in men and women alike, and arousal was already high in qualification. In that sample, feeling more on edge before a match was the normal state of things, even at national squad level, and not a sign of a personal problem; and since pressure costs the arrows little in the measurements of results, I think it is more useful to learn to shoot with that tension on board than to wait until it is gone.
The second concerns training. If part of the pressure comes from the format, that is, from alternating arrows, set scoring and a verdict after every end, the format can be rehearsed before a competition: set system matches with a training partner, alternating arrows against the clock, a single arrow at the end of a session. The registry holds as reported that a mock competition with spectators and noise gets archers used to pressure, and that rests on accounts from national teams, not on measurements of anxiety or scores. So I suggest it as a way of getting to know that situation before meeting it in competition, without promising that the tension will go away.
The third concerns how to read a lost match. In brackets the opponents are almost always close, and between close archers a handful of arrows is enough to overturn the qualification order. Before putting a defeat down to tension I would look at the match's average score per arrow and at the qualification score: if they are close to the usual ones, the defeat says more about the format than about the mind. The same goes for the single arrow, and I go into it in the article on what one shoot-off arrow decides.
The last concerns qualification. The Tehran comparison comes from a competition in which qualification eliminated nobody, and it does not say that qualification is calm for everyone: where it makes a cut, and in any case where it decides who meets whom in the first round, it carries weight too. How calm qualification feels depends partly on how much that qualification asks of you, and I would not treat a ranking place that sets the bracket, and often the path to the finals, as a warm-up.