2022 BIRMINGHAM WORLD GAMES
Forty-one years ago, the first World Games were held in Santa Clara, California. Under the banner of global sports federation behemoth GAISF, it was originally conceived as an event for sports that were not represented at the Olympics. Of the original programme at that event, badminton, baseball and softball, taekwondo, trampolining and karate all later became full Olympic sports.
However, it wasn’t all plain sailing. At the time, the US Olympic Committee president Philip Krumm called the games “a splinter group” and “harmful”, and the World Games retained a uneasy relationship with the IOC for many decades, which still flares up from time to time. More recently, the World Games have been fully welcomed into the Olympic family and the events are broadcast on the Olympic Channel.
Archery has been part of the programme since 1985, when a field archery competition was held in London. It included compound, recurve and barebow. A compound target competition was introduced in 2013 in Cali, but field archery has remained at the heart of the competition and it has become one of the premium events for barebow archers.
Britain’s Naomi Folkard won the recurve event in 2013, and was runner-up in 2017. This year, the competition was held in the southern USA in Birmingham, Alabama, in conditions remarkable for oven-like heat and humidity, although the field course in Avondale
