Mental preparation of Olympic archers: Robazza 1998

The two authors interviewed the whole Italian Olympic archery squad for Atlanta 1996, eight archers in all, four men and four women, aged 18 to 36 (25.6 on average), with an average of 10.3 years of archery and 6.4 of international competition; three had already been to an Olympic Games. They wanted to know which mental qualities the archers thought necessary to shoot well and what they actually did in competition.

The interviews produced 44 themes. Sixteen concern the mental conditions seen as necessary, grouped into five dimensions: positive expectations (the most often mentioned, with confidence first), concentration, helpful emotions, body awareness and technical preparation. The other 28 concern strategies in competition, in four dimensions: control of arousal (emotions, muscle tension, breathing, inner dialogue), imagery and self-talk, concentration on the task, and reaction to mistakes.

Strategies differed a great deal from one archer to the next. One archer sought calm because shooting aggressively sent the arrows everywhere; another got charged up by fighting a duel with the target. Two felt no need to control their heart rate; one avoided imagining the shot because it made them feel unsure. One had eleven checkpoints to go through during the shot. Faced with a mistake, some simply went back to correct execution, some erased the mistake and started again, and some analysed it to correct the next shot. One thing was shared: all eight mentally checked positions and actions during the shot, and on the range all were very consistent in timing and routine.

The interviews, lasting 60 to 90 minutes, took place in person a month before the Olympics, during the European Championships, and were recorded. The interviewer was the first author, trained in qualitative research and for five years a psychology consultant to archers, following a guide built on an earlier study of Canadian Olympians, on an interview with the American archer Darrell Pace and on his own experience. After the interview each archer was observed in practice while explaining their shooting procedure step by step.

The transcripts, 60 single-spaced pages, were read and listened to again by both authors, who independently extracted the raw themes and a profile of each archer, then reached agreement. The themes were grouped into increasingly general levels (hierarchical inductive analysis) and finally checked against the original transcripts. The numbers in brackets in the tables show how many archers expressed each theme.

These are eight people describing themselves, interviewed by a sport psychologist as part of the psychological support for their Olympic preparation: they may also have said what they thought was expected of them. The answers are not linked to any score, and there is no comparison with weaker archers: the study says what these champions do, not whether these strategies set them apart from those who win less. Many themes were expressed by a single archer.

The authors write that the archers had developed their strategies without specific training in sport psychology, but the team had psychological support for Atlanta and the interviewer had been working with archers for five years: how much of the described procedures was spontaneous cannot be established. It is an exploratory study, as the title says.

For anyone who shoots, the main point is variety. Among the eight archers of the 1996 Italian Olympic squad there was no shared mental recipe: some sought calm and some sought to get charged up, some imagined the shot and some avoided it, some analysed a mistake and some erased it. Copying a champion's mental routine is therefore no guarantee that it will work for someone else.

What they had in common was a precise shooting routine repeated with consistent timing, with attention directed to the parts of the movement (bow hand, string fingers, anchor, bow-arm push) more than to the outcome. The study does not show that this is what made them win, but it describes how Olympic-level archers worked mentally at the moment that counts, and it is one of the few sources that does so in their own words.