Korea and India split the recurve golds in Okazaki, an Indian man finally wins an individual World Cup Final, and World Archery closes out a season of postponed stops and reopened doors for Russian athletes. Here's what moved in archery this month.

Okazaki: Korea's Recurve Men Hold the Line, India's Women Break Through

Archery at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games wrapped in late September and early October at Okazaki, and the results read like a changing of the guard in one event and a continuation in another.

Lee Woo-seok left Japan with two golds. He anchored South Korea's recurve men's team to a 5-1 win over India in the team final, then beat home favorite Junya Nakanishi 6-2 in the individual final on October 3 — his second gold of the Games.

"Lee Woo-seok, Kim Je-deok and Kim Woo-jin defeated India 5-1 in the men's team final, before Lee returned two days later to beat Nakanishi for the individual title." RECURVE MEN, OKAZAKI — OCTOBER 1–3

On the women's side, Kumkum Mohod gave India a double gold of its own. After winning team gold, she beat South Korea's Oh Ye-jin in an individual final that went to a shoot-off — both archers tied 5-5 on set points before Mohod closed it with a 10 to Oh's 8.

India's compound squads added three more team golds — men's, women's and mixed — with the women's team beating China 238-234 and the mixed pair of Sahil Jadhav and Chikitha Taniparthi edging Korea in a shoot-off. Compound isn't an Olympic discipline yet, but it's where India's depth showed most clearly this Games.

Medal counts for the Games varied slightly by outlet (53 vs. 54 for India's full delegation) — the archery-specific results above are consistent across sources.

Bommadevara's First: A Historic Final in Saltillo

The World Cup season closed in September at Saltillo, Mexico, and the headline belongs to Dhiraj Bommadevara, who became the first Indian man to win an individual title at a World Cup Final. His route there was the hard way: a 7-1 quarter-final win over Olympic medallist Berkim Tümer, a 7-1 semi-final win over two-time Olympic silver medallist Jean-Charles Valladont, then a 6-5 shoot-off win over Japan's Junya Nakanishi in the gold match.

Season Scorecard

2026 Hyundai Archery World Cup — stage by stage

  • 1 · April — Puebla, Mexico — Brady Ellison takes recurve men's gold in a shoot-off; Easton's X10 sweeps every individual podium
  • 2 · May — Shanghai, China — India's Deepika Kumari, Ankita Bhakat & Kumkum Mohod beat China in a shoot-off; Vietnam wins its first-ever World Cup medal
  • 3 · June — Antalya, Türkiye — A quieter stage for the big medal contenders on the compound side
  • 4 · July — Madrid, Spain — South Korea sweeps both recurve team titles — men beat France 5-3, women beat the USA 5-1
  • Final · Sept — Saltillo, Mexico — Bommadevara's historic recurve men's gold; Mete Yumak takes recurve men's bronze

The recurve women's final in Saltillo is reported by one source as a Marie Horáčková (CZE) win over Katharina Bauer (GER); we found no corroborating match report, so treat that result as unconfirmed pending an official results book.

Off the Line: Governance and the Road to LA28

World Archery's back-office news this year has been as consequential as anything shot on a field. In its August newsletter, the federation confirmed it is lifting restrictions on Russian athletes, teams and officials — a reversal that will reshape start lists heading into 2027. The same period of updates named Gold Coast as host of the 2027 World Archery Para Championships, and confirmed compound archer Emircan Haney as World Archery's 2025 Archer of the Year.

LA28 Qualification, in Brief

The qualification system for Los Angeles 2028 is now set, and it changes the shape of the Olympic tournament itself. Compound archery debuts as a mixed-team event with 12 teams. Recurve team fields shrink to eight per gender, and — notably — world ranking no longer allocates recurve team quota places; those now come through the 2027 World Championships in Medellín and the continental championships, each setting minimum qualifying scores (650 for men's recurve, 620 for women's, at 70m) that athletes must hit at a registered World Archery event.

128 athlete places, 116 of them decided by qualification.

On the Calendar

Two stops have moved. The World Cup event in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq has been pushed to October 25–30, 2026. The Hyundai World Archery Para Series stop in Dubai has slipped further, now set for December 5–11, 2026. Sources also disagree by a day on the Asian Para Games archery dates in Aichi-Nagoya — some newsletters give October 19–24, others October 18–24 — worth double-checking on World Archery's own calendar before travel plans are made around it.

Sources