Daniel Sanches Pombrol won the bronze medal match 6-4 in a close match against Ru Barlow in the international bracket at the Icelandic National Championships 25-26 of February.
The match was very close and went down to the last arrow deciding the winner. Daniel took the first set 2-0, Ru then took the next 2 sets 2-4, Daniel then took the fourth set 4-4, all tied up going into the last set of the match. In the last set Daniel shot a 26, Ru had shot 17 on his first 2 arrows meaning he needed a 10 to win, 9 to force the match into a shoot-off or 8 or less to lose on his last arrow, Ru shoot an 8 for a total of 25 points against Daniels 26 points in the last set, so Daniel got the win 6-4.
Since foreign competitors cannot compete for or win the title of National Champion in Icelandic rules, a separate match bracket is setup at the National Championship events, so that international athletes can also participate. This was the case this time with Ru and Daniel so a separate Recurve International Men event was created.
When Ru and Daniel arrived in Iceland on Saturday their airline had lost their luggage, so they showed up to the events competition field with no equipment. The organizers rushed to assemble some equipment that they could setup and use to participate in the qualification round of their event the next morning, a couple of Hoyt risers etc.
Daniel and Ru got the offer to be sports commentators and control the camera switching and graphics during the live alternate shooting finals on Saturday, for fun, for the compound and barebow classes. They seemed excited, although a bit nervous, to try it out and for the rest of the day they had a blast doing something they were not prepared for or expected.
On Sunday Ru and Daniel had gotten confirmation from the airline that their bags would arrive at the airport on Sunday, the day of the competition, but it would arrive to late to pick the bags up at the airport before the qualification round. So both of them showed up during the qualification round, shot with the borrowed equipment and then after the qualification the president of World Archery Iceland drove them to the airport to pick up their luggage, and they arrived back at the archery range just in time for their matches.
Both Ru and Daniel won their matches up the semi-finals but both lost in the semi finals, so they would have to shoot against each other for the bronze.
Since they had been a break through success among the athletes and the audience in the livestream for barebow and compound on Saturday, and they both thought it was fun and wanted to get another shot at being sports commentators, the organizers decided to change the finals schedule a bit and move the international matches to the first matches of the days livestream. That gave Ru and Daniel the chance to also be the sports commentators on the livestream for the rest of the Sunday alternate shooting finals for the recurve and longbow.
More information about the event can be found here:
- Results on ianseo
- Livestream alternate shooting gold and bronze finals in barebow and compound on Saturday
- Livestream alternate shooting gold and bronze finals in recurve and longbow on Sunday
- Pictures of the event on smugmug
- Individual matches of all gold and bronze medal matches can be found on the Archery TV Iceland Youtube channel (are being created now, some have already been published others will come out in the next few days/weeks)
