ARCHERY: FOUR-time Olympian Naomi Folkard made a successful return to international competition after taking bronze in the third leg of the World Cup in Nimes.
Following a three-month break from action, Folkard returned to action in a class field of 74 ladies, including many of the world’s best archers.
The Korean ladies took eight of the top ten places in the qualifying rounds, hitting five dozen arrows on a small three spot face at 18-metres.
Despite using a very lightweight bow (34lbs) because of a lack of recent practice, Folkard qualified in 16th place, with a good score of 572 and joined the top 32 qualifiers in the head to knock out competition.
Folkard cruised through her first match against Reena Parnat (Estonia) 6-2, before inflicting a surprise defeat on the number one seed and world record holder Korea’s Sehui Park.
Over four sets of three arrows, Folkard dropped only one arrow point (30,30,29,30) to gain a 6-2 victory over the Korean.
This brought Folkard to a quarter-final match against another Korean Eun Jung Kim, in a match which went to five sets.
Again shooting superbly, with ends of 30,29,29,29,30, Folkard came out on top 6-4 to set up a semi-final match against yet another Korean, in the shape of Yun Jin who is ranked fourth.
Jin found Folkard on top form, which Folkard was not able to match and lost 6-2. However, she made the most of the opportunity to go for bronze against Randi Degn (Denmark) and maintaining excellent shooting won bronze 6-2.
Since Rio Folkard has shot little, but has been spending a lot of time coaching juniors. In Nimes she was supporting one of her pupils, 15 year old Alyssia Tromans-Ansell, and was delighted when Alyssia won gold in the Junior Recurve competition.
