Korean women's archery team at Tokyo: Putranto 2025

The author, a communication researcher at Universitas Negeri Surabaya, watched the official videos of the women's team final at Tokyo 2020, won by South Korea (An San, Jang Min-hee and Kang Chae-young) against the Russian Olympic Committee team, and classified the gestures and exchanges among the archers and with the coach. He chose 19 scenes and for each one described what can be seen and what kind of communication it represents: high fives, encouragement, discussion, instructions, a thumbs-up, hugs.

In the summary table 6 scenes are classed as verbal communication, 7 as non-verbal and 6 as both verbal and non-verbal. Instructions always appear as verbal communication, while high fives recur throughout the match. The author concludes that the team's communication is mainly non-verbal and that the high five is its main sign: between archers, on the shooting line, it serves to congratulate and encourage; with the coach, off the line, to celebrate a good shot.

The method is a semiotic analysis following Peirce: for each scene the author gives the icon (what can be seen, for example four people in white touching fists), the index and the symbol, meaning the significance he assigns to it (high five, support, instructions). The videos are those published on olympics.com, but the paper does not say how many there were, how long they lasted or how the scenes were chosen, beyond the fact that they showed signs of verbal or non-verbal communication.

The scenes are then arranged by stage of the match: off the line at the start, on the line, off the line midway, on the line again and off the line at the end. There is no systematic count of every exchange, no second observer and no interviews with the archers or the coach.

Everything rests on one person's interpretation of television footage. Classing a scene as verbal communication without hearing what is said, from body positions alone, is an inference; and the same description (one person with a cap and a raised bow, two others behind) recurs across several instruction scenes. The predominance of non-verbal communication rests on 7 scenes against 6 and 6, and it disappears once the mixed scenes are counted: 13 scenes have a non-verbal component and 12 a verbal one. Even that one extra scene is uncertain: scene 11 (high fives and shouts) is classed as verbal and non-verbal in its own table and as non-verbal only in the summary table; with the first classification the counts become 6, 6 and 7.

In the discussion the author also refers to individual and mixed team finals that are not analysed in the results. It is a single match of a single team, and nothing links the communication observed to the score.

The study offers nothing measured. It describes how, during an Olympic final, the Korean archers often high-five each other and talk to the coach off the line, which can be seen in many team events, but it does not say whether communicating this way helps anyone shoot better, or how losing teams behave. For a coach the most useful idea is the distinction between moments on the line and moments off it, with different kinds of exchange; to find out what athletes and coach actually say to each other and what it achieves, the author himself names interviews as the next step.