Steady nerves and steely focus the key for Queensland Olympic archery hopefuls

MOST athletes on the cusp of Olympic selection are all aquiver but Queensland’s two top archery hopes for Rio are all about steady nerves and steely focus.

Archers Taylor Worth and Ryan Tyack are hopefuls for the Olympics. Pic Jono Searle.

MOST athletes on the cusp of Olympic selection are all aquiver but Queensland’s two top archery hopes for Rio are all about steady nerves and steely focus.

This weekend Taylor Worth, 25, and his mate Ryan Tyack, 24, will be pitted against each other to qualify for the Rio Olympics and, while it might be drawing a long bow to suggest they are ice cool ahead of this great test, Ryan points put that he is from Mapleton where it is always a few degrees colder than the rest of the State.

When he was a kid, Ryan’s mum Lynette encouraged him to turn off the computer and turn on to sport and since his favourite computer game was the historical action series Age of Empires, he was drawn to archery.

But what started out as a bid to save Ryan’s increasingly square eyes from the computer screen soon became an international sporting career. Lynette was so determined to help him make the Olympics that she started reading books on archery from a local library and became a leading Australian coach. Two years ago in Nimes, France, Ryan won the world indoor title.

The Australian Open will run from today until Sunday at the Samford Valley Target Archers, with Olympic trials continuing until next Wednesday.

Four male archers will be chosen for a final squad that eventually will be culled to three by national coach Ya Ping Shih.

Ryan and Taylor have been mates for 13 years and won gold together at the World Youth Archery Championships in Antalya, Turkey in 2008.

Archers Taylor Worth (left) and Ryan Tyack are Olympic hopefuls.

Taylor, who moved to Brisbane from Perth two years ago, won gold at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games where his coach was Australia’s only Olympic champion, Simon Fairweather.

He then made the field of 64 for the London Olympics.

Even though he beat 55 other archers he was ``a little disappointed’’ to finish 9th and has been fighting the post-London blues with the help of Australian team psychologist Michele MacNaughton.

“After London it took a little while to get my vibe back,’’ he said. “There was a bit of post-Olympic depression. You spend your whole life chasing that one moment and then you wake up the next day and its all over; its all finished and it’s like so what happens now?

“I took six months off to relax and re-evaluate my goals and I’m ready to climb back on the horse again.’’

Taylor says he played every sport under the sun as a kid but took to archery when he was 10 years old at a holiday camp.

He loved the individual nature of the sport, “just me and the bow’’.

He practises on the Belmont range anywhere from four to seven hours a day, six days a week, shutting his mind down from all outside interference and soaking in the stillness as he sends hundreds of arrows to a small yellow target 70m away.

The tension on his $3500 bowstring is as much as 25kg and by the end of a session it is like he has been pumping iron all day.

But he is also lifting himself out of the doldrums to become a medal hope again.

Originally published as Steady nerves and steely focus the key for Queensland Olympic archery hopefuls