ANCIENT ORIGINS

FROM WEAPON OF WAR TO ROBIN HOOD AND THE OLYMPIC ARENA

There has rarely been a clean-sweep like it in sport; in 1908, British women took the first 22 places in the archery competition at the Olympic Games in London. Truth be known, Britain was the only nation to field any female archers at that Games.

Nonetheless, the hearts of Robin Hood and his Merry Men would surely have swelled with pride. For in a sport that has held competitions since medieval times and whose basic principles remain the same despite the advance of technology, the outlaw who lived in Sherwood Forest in the 12th Century is still honoured; a "Robin Hood" in the modern sport represents the splitting of the shaft of an arrow already in the target by another arrow, supposedly in recognition of the legendary Mr Hood's ability to do just that.

The bow and arrow was used for hunting and as a weapon of war long before Robin Hood championed the poor in their struggle against the tax demands of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Their first recorded use appears in ancient Egyptian drawings that date back 5,000 years, though historians estimate that the invention of the bow and arrow goes back 25,000 years.

The Assyrians developed the recurve bow around 1500 BC, bringing greater flexibility to the bow, which could now be bent backwards to provide more power and make handling that much easier. The basic design of the recurve bow is at the heart of the technology used in today's competitive bows and arrows.

In more modern history, Genghis Khan and his Mongol armies conquered vast territories using a short bow. William the Conqueror conquered with the long bow and heralded a great tradition of archery among the English in battle during the Middle Ages. The advent of gunpowder as the primary weapon of war eventually relegated the bow and arrow to the sporting arena and competitions between England and France thrived.

Introduced to the Olympic Games in 1900 as an extension of those cross-Channel contests, the competition was more like a national championship than an international challenge in the early days. After Britain's clean sweep in London in 1908, archery was dropped from the Games.

It enjoyed a brief reprieve at Stockholm in 1920 but then disappeared from the Games until Munich in 1972. Team events were added in 1988 and in Barcelona in 1992, a new and popular head-to-head format was introduced to make the competition more exciting.

Bows have developed from the basic wood and string model familiar to so many from their childhood to sophisticated pieces of equipment. These days, they can be made from laminations of wood and carbon fibre, ceramic (boron) or hardened foam. The standard model today, however, is made of fibreglass, while arrows made of aluminium or carbon graphite can travel more than 240km/h. Though the basic principles of the ancient bow remain, modern equipment, with bowsights, bowmarks, stabilisers and foresights, are highly complex.