Seeking Olympic Gold in Archery-American Brady Ellison
http://msn.foxsports.com/olympics/ar...ts-gold-062012
This guy bowhunts and target shoots . Certainly not a tradional Archer but has to be admired for his talent and his spirit in my opinion.-Tyr
ArcheryFOX Sports Exclusive'You win or you go home' Brady Ellison is the top-ranked archer in the world. Share This Story
Reid ForgraveReid Forgrave has worked for the Des Moines Register, the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Seattle Times. His work has been recognized by Associated Press Sports Editors, the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, and the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors.
MORE>> Updated Jul 5, 2012 1:02 PM ET
Certain Olympic sports rank exponentially higher on the badass scale than others
Boxing and taekwondo, for example, outrank rhythmic gymnastics and trampoline. Weightlifting is more badass than table tennis. Take fencing and equestrian, with their military pedigrees, over rowing and badminton.
But there is one American badass who beats them all.
Brady Ellison doesn’t look like much: A husky 23-year-old country boy from Arizona who favors country music, shaggy hair and enormous belt buckles. The sport in which Ellison is the top-ranked athlete in the world, archery, isn’t the sexiest, either. Two archers stand 70 meters from their target and shoot a dozen arrows toward a bull’s-eye, 12.2 centimeters in diameter. The highest scorer moves onto the next round, and so on and so forth, until there’s one person left, and that’s your gold medalist.
Badass, America wonders. Please. Give us the head-pounding spikes of beach volleyball or the 10-seconds-of-glory adrenaline rush of the 100-meter dash or the nonstop pace of basketball. Archery just doesn’t sound like the sport for the American badass. Sounds like a sport dominated by some wienie country like South Korea, which in recent decades has actually been true.
But consider the badass credentials of one Brady Ellison, The Real American BadAss and the top-ranked archer in the world: At age 11, Ellison shot and killed his first bear, a 300-pounder, with a rifle on his grandfather’s ranch. He bow-hunts pretty much anything he can get a tag for: bighorn sheep, elk, javelinas, wild boar. He bow-hunts fish, for God’s sake. His favorite day of hunting ever was earlier this year, when Ellison and his father each bagged his own buck with a bow and arrow on the same day.
Ready to reconsider your definition of badass?
“My favorite hunting is elk,” Ellison said. “They’re big, they’re fun. If you get them in the bugle, you can call them in. They make a lot of noise. They’re a big animal. Especially if you’re in a thicket and you get a bull to talk, you’re bugling to them, he comes crashing through the brush at you — it’s an adrenaline rush, because he thinks you’re another bull.”
He paused a moment for you to shudder at the thought: There’s the 800-pound animal charging at you, and here are you, sitting in a thicket without a gun.
Ellison shrugged.
“Bows can kill anything, just like a rifle,” he said.
There’s something beautifully medieval about archery. Ignore the vast array of high-tech archery gadgets out there — from stabilizers to sights, from rangefinders to special silicone wax for high-tension bow strings — and realize that at its most basic, archery is simply man propelling pointed stick through air, heading toward animal. There are few things more primal. Before archery was a sport, archery was man’s survival.
At this primal sport, Brady Ellison is the best, with three World Cup wins in a row heading into London. He is Robin Hood. He is the Greek god Apollo. He is Hawkeye from “The Avengers.” He is Katniss Everdeen from “The Hunger Games.”
And the No. 2 archer in the world, Im Dong-Hyun from South Korea, who won a team gold medal in 2008, has him in his sights.
The adrenaline level at a big-game bow-hunt vs. a big-time Olympic archery matchup is, well, different. First of all, at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London — home to the Olympic archery competition and replicated in Ellison’s father’s backyard for practice — there will not be an 800-pound animal chasing down the archers. (Though, come to think of it, that would be pretty badass.)
But there will be distractions. There will be pressure. There will be seven years of training bearing down on Ellison, since 2005 when he switched from shooting a compound bow to shooting a recurve bow, the only type of bow used in Olympic competition.
“Archery is a sport where it’s one-on-one, you win or you go home,” Ellison said. “It’s kind of like golf in a way. It’s a mental game, a lot of focus. And if you mess up, you’re more than likely not going to win. It’s a game of perfection. There’s just a draw to being perfect.”
Perfection means focus. Perfection means mental discipline. Perfection means Ellison’s 20/10 vision staring down at a target for hours on end. Perfection means body control, which hasn’t always been the easiest for Ellison, who spent a year of his childhood in leg braces because of Perthes disease, which was eating away at the head of his femurs. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that, Forrest Gump-like, this Olympian ran straight out of his braces, breaking three or four sets by the time doctors said he was OK without them.)
And perfection means heading to London and coming back with gold. And nobody can dispute that would be very, very badass.
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Originally Posted by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot
--Tyr
