Brady Ellison is the top archer on the planet right now. At 23, he’s ranked No. 1 on the recurve bow, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact he didn’t pick up a recurve bow until six years ago.
Before that, he fired a compound bow, an entirely different animal. To switch from one to the other, and excel at it, would be like Michael Phelps winning a medal in diving.
“Usually it’s very difficult to go from compound to recurve,” says George Tekmitchov, an engineer at Hoyt Archery, which provides bows to the World Archery Federation and the U.S. Olympic Team.
Wait. Back up. What’s a recurve bow?
The recurve bow is the antithesis of a compound bow, which uses a system of pulleys and multiple strings to accelerate an arrow. A compound bow is more energy efficient, and therefore offers greater accuracy, velocity and distance. The design was patented in 1969, and compound bows are the most common style you’ll find in the United States.
The recurve, on the other hand, looks much like the bows you see in movies like The Hunger Games and Brave. They feature a single string and long arms, or limbs. They’ve been around in some form since 1200 B.C., but they are anything but primitive. In fact, they’re some of the most high-tech tools you’ll see at the 2012 Summer Games.
At its most basic, the recurve is a grip with two arms, each swept forward to store more energy. It’s their stiffness that provides the power in the shot, and their stiffness largely comes from their outer layers, or skin. For its top-end Formula HPX bow, Hoyt uses stiff triaxial 3-D carbon fiber, woven in different directions around the arm to keep it from twisting under the force of the draw.
Olympians like Ellison and Jennifer Nichols fire at targets 70 meters away, making power crucial. Accuracy, of course, is key, as is consistency in both the archer and the equipment. It doesn’t matter how precisely Ellison or Nichols aim, draw and release if minor vibrations in their bow cause each shot to differ.
“You have to shoot one way, over and over again,” says Tekmitchov.
Most of that consistency comes from the material of the bow. Sandwiched between the carbon on those long arms is a synthetic foam core adapted from Navy submarines. This incompressible foam, made of evenly spaced glass microballoons, let subs dive without getting crushed. It performs the same function in bows: When the bow is drawn, compressing the carbon skin, the foam maintains the arm’s shape.
Betwixt the limbs, the handle is the bow’s user interface. It’s more than just a place to hold the bow. It offers precise feedback, in the form of feel, on how you’re shooting. As such, elite levels customize their grips, and know almost instantaneously if they’ve nailed a shot.
“With a good bow, it almost talks back to you,” says Tekmitchov.
If you watch archery at the Olympics, you’ll notice two long rods extending horizontally from the grip. They’re stabilizers, weights that dampen vibrations long enough for the arrow to escape the bow (a process that takes about 15 milliseconds). Archers fine-tune the weight to suit their style.
Arrows are no less advanced. An arrow flexes and reverberates as it flies toward the target 70 meters away – a distance that arrow will cover in about one second. That’s long enough for the wind to affect its flight, so arrow designers must carefully consider an arrow’s weight, stiffness, and profile.
Easton hit on a design that uses aluminum wrapped in carbon fiber to balance weight and stiffness with a narrow shaft. At around 5.5 mm in diameter, Easton’s flagship arrow, the X10, is barely more than half the maximum allowed width, which means it’s less affected by wind. The tapered end further diminishes the effect of wind, while allowing it to escape the bow more easily. The design has proven so successful, Tekmitchov says, that every Olympic medalist since 1996 has fired X10s.
Ellison is likely to be among them. Tekmitchov attributes Ellison’s successful transition to recurve partly to his physical strength. The pulleys on a compound bow mean that to draw it requires much less force; around 12 pounds, compared to the 53 Ellison draws on a recurve. Despite that, Ellison says it’s more of a mental game.
“You have to think about the same thing and your mind has to be disciplined so every time you shoot, every time you step up to a line your thoughts are exactly the same, so your body is exactly the same,” he says.
His bow is honed just as keenly.
