Competition anxiety in junior archers: Bhutia 2026

Eighty recurve archers, 50 boys and 30 girls aged 13 to 21, filled in a competitive anxiety questionnaire about an hour before shooting the qualification round of the 44th Indian junior national championship, in February 2025. The authors compared males and females and related the answers to the score each archer made over 72 arrows at 70 metres.

The boys averaged 641 points and the girls 597, but the boys were also older (18.8 against 17.5 years) and had been shooting longer (5.76 against 4.63 years). On somatic anxiety, cognitive anxiety and self-confidence the two groups were practically the same. None of the three measures was linked to score within the male or female groups taken alone; pooling all 80 archers, self-confidence shows a weak correlation with score (r = 0.244), while the two kinds of anxiety show none (r = 0.075 and -0.057). The two anxieties went together (r = 0.413), and among the girls alone the link between them was clearer.

Data were collected at the Sports Authority of India centre in Bolpur, West Bengal, during the championship. To be included archers needed at least two years of training and no current injury; six were excluded for insufficient experience or incomplete questionnaires. The questionnaire is the English version of the CSAI-2R, 17 items scored 1 to 4 and split into cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and self-confidence; scores are reported as the mean per item. It was completed in a quiet room, with the researchers present, just before the warm-up.

Performance is the official qualification round total: 72 arrows at 70 metres in 12 ends of six, with a maximum of 720. Males and females are compared with the Mann-Whitney test and the relationships with Spearman correlation.

The score gap between boys and girls says nothing about sex as such: the boys were older and more experienced, and the study does not adjust for these differences. The questionnaire was completed once, before qualification, while the score covers the whole round: anxiety measured an hour beforehand does not necessarily describe how the archer felt at the tenth end. Qualification is also shot without a direct opponent; the elimination matches were not considered.

The sample is one of convenience, and with 30 girls the separate analysis by sex has little power. Some numbers do not add up: a correlation of -0.156 across 80 people does not reach the significance the text claims, and the description of the exclusions (two plus four, then "two females and four males") is inconsistent. The journal has questionable editorial standards.

For anyone who shoots, the most interesting finding is an absence: in these young national-level archers, how anxious they reported feeling before qualification had no link with their final score, while those who felt more confident tended to score a few more points, with a weak link. This does not mean anxiety is irrelevant in competition, only that a questionnaire filled in an hour beforehand is not enough to predict a 72-arrow round. The gap between boys and girls, who shot at the same distance, has to be read together with age and years of shooting, which differed.