How Does Archery Work? Bows, Arrows and Why Accuracy Beats Strength

A bow's limbs bend as the string is drawn back and straighten when it is released, and the energy stored is the area under the force-draw curve, the pull multiplied by the distance over which it is pulled. A simple wooden bow, a self bow, has a curve that rises steadily, so that the last inches of the draw are the hardest; a recurve bow, whose tips curve away from the archer, stores more energy for the same peak draw because the recurved tips add leverage as the string leaves them; and a compound bow uses cams, eccentric wheels at the limb tips, so that the draw weight peaks in the middle and falls to a fraction at full draw, letting the archer hold seventy pounds of stored energy with twenty pounds of effort while aiming. About three quarters of the stored energy goes into the arrow; the rest goes into the limbs' own motion, the string and the air.

The arrow does not sit in the line of the string's travel. On a traditional bow the arrow rests against the side of the handle, pointing slightly across the line of flight, and when the string is released it pushes the arrow's nock forward while the point is held off-line by the bow, so that the shaft bends around the handle, flexes back the other way as it leaves, and oscillates in the air, straightening out within a few metres. This is the archer's paradox, described in the 1930s with high-speed film: the arrow flies where it was aimed because it bends around the obstacle in its way, and a shaft of the wrong stiffness, the spine, for the bow's draw weight will bend too much or too little and fly off to one side. Modern bows cut a window through the handle so that the arrow sits nearer the centre, and the paradox is reduced but not gone.

The parts of a modern competition setup:

• •The riser: a machined aluminium or carbon handle with the sight window, the arrow rest and the mounting for the limbs
• •The limbs: carbon and foam laminates in a recurve profile, detachable and sold by draw weight
• •The string: strands of a polyethylene fibre that barely stretches, with a nocking point and a serving where the fingers pull
• •The arrows: carbon or aluminium-carbon shafts matched in spine to the bow, with fletchings, vanes at the rear that spin the arrow and stabilise it, and points chosen for weight
• •The sight: a pin on an adjustable bracket, set for each distance, since the arrow drops several metres below its line of launch over seventy
• •The stabilisers: rods projecting forward and back that add inertia and damp the bow's movement at release
• •The clicker: a thin blade that snaps off the arrow point at exactly the archer's full draw, so that every shot is loosed at the same length

Olympic archery is shot with a recurve at seventy metres, at a target 122 centimetres across whose ten-ring is 12.2 centimetres, and a top archer puts most arrows in that ring. The skill is repetition. The archer's stance, the placing of the fingers on the string, the anchor of the hand against the jaw, the alignment of the bow arm and the timing of the release are made identical shot after shot, and the release itself is not a decision but a reflex triggered by the clicker, since a hand that chooses when to let go flinches. Strength matters less than the ability to hold a forty-pound draw steady while the sight pin settles, and the mental game, shooting under a clock against an opponent in head-to-head sets, is what the training is mostly for; South Korea, whose archers have won most Olympic golds since 1984, trains them in stadiums full of noise.

The bow is at least ten thousand years old, and the composite bow of horn, wood and sinew, made by the steppe peoples, was the weapon of the Scythians, the Huns and the Mongols, who shot from horseback at a gallop; the English longbow of yew, drawn to 150 pounds, was the weapon of Crecy and Agincourt, and its archers' skeletons show the twisted spines and enlarged shoulders of a lifetime's practice. Gunpowder ended the bow's military life by the seventeenth century, and archery became a pastime of the gentry, then a sport, in the Olympics in 1900 and continuously since 1972. The compound bow, invented in Missouri in 1966, made bowhunting the American mass sport that it is, and the recurve, the shape the Scythians carried, is what the Olympic archer draws.

Most people have a dominant eye, the one the brain relies on when lining something up, and it matters in archery because the sight must be aligned with that eye. You can find yours in seconds: make a small triangle with your hands at arm's length, look through it at a distant object with both eyes open, then close each eye in turn. The eye that still sees the object through the triangle is dominant. Most people's dominant eye is on the same side as their dominant hand, but a significant minority are cross-dominant, and coaches often advise them to shoot left-handed or close one eye.

A stranger problem affects experienced archers. Target panic is the loss of control over the shot: the archer cannot hold the sight on the centre, releases the moment the pin reaches the gold, or freezes and cannot release at all. It is thought to be a learned anxiety response, related to the yips that trouble golfers putting and darts players throwing, and it can strike even champions. The usual remedies retrain the release so that it happens without a conscious decision, which is one reason for the clicker, and include shooting at blank targets at close range to separate the act of releasing from the pressure of aiming.

There is more than one way to hold a string. Olympic archers use the Mediterranean draw, with the index finger above the arrow and the middle and ring fingers below, protected by a leather tab. The horse archers of the steppe, and later Chinese, Korean and Ottoman archers, used the thumb draw instead: the string is hooked by the thumb alone, locked in place by the index finger, and protected by a thumb ring of horn, bone, metal or jade. Because the string rolls off the thumb in a different direction, a right-handed thumb archer rests the arrow on the right side of the bow rather than the left.

Japanese kyudo uses a strikingly different bow. The yumi is longer than the archer is tall, usually more than two metres, and it is gripped well below the middle, so the upper limb is much longer than the lower, an asymmetry often linked to shooting from horseback or kneeling. Kyudo is shot with a thumb draw using a stiff glove, at a target usually 28 metres away, and is practised as much as a discipline of posture and mind as a test of accuracy: its eight formal stages run from setting the feet to the moment after release, and in grading examinations form is assessed alongside the hit.

A widely repeated story claims that the rude two-finger gesture in Britain began with English longbowmen at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The French, the tale goes, cut off the drawing fingers of captured archers, so English archers taunted them by waving their two fingers to show they still had them.

Historians have found no evidence for this. No contemporary account of Agincourt mentions the gesture, and the earliest clear records of the two-finger insult come from around the start of the twentieth century. The story appears to be a modern invention, attractive because it links a familiar gesture to a famous battle and to the real importance of English archers in that war.

Archery works by storing the slow work of the draw in the bent limbs of the bow and releasing it into the arrow in milliseconds, with recurve tips and compound cams storing more energy for the same effort; the arrow bends around the bow's handle as it leaves and flies straight because its stiffness is matched to the bow. The sport is the art of exact repetition, with sight, stabilisers and a clicker that fixes the draw, and its Olympic form, a recurve at seventy metres, descends from the composite bow of the steppe.