Danes Host Ancient Warfare Championships In Copenhagen

On the face of it Archery seems an insignificant sport for people with overly developed arms, but the truth is it’s an echo of a past we should probably leave behind

The World Archery Championships get underway in Copenhagen on Sunday and, according to organizers, there’s already a record number of entries signed up to take part in the event at Christiansborg Palace. A very pleased World Archery President, Ugur Erdener, said;
“The proof of archery’s growth at the international level is in the numbers. It is a universal approach to developing the sport from the ground up that drives this growth.”
Which is delightful, entirely in keeping with sporting public relations, and retains the dignity of the occasion, and I only say that because I’m gambling news I think it’s a lot of old cobblers won’t surprise you one little bit.

Archery World Championships

• Copenhagen, Denmark
• Record number of entrants
• But not the biggest in history

Attempting to pretend archery is an up-and-coming sport is like portraying windmills as the energy creator of the future……oh wait……okay bad example, but you get my point. Archery isn’t new, it’s been around since the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Mesolithic era, and some of the oldest in-tact examples date back to 9000BC, so putting a spin on things so it sounds like a minor specialist sport in need of popularization in the press is just a little galling. Certainly adding “at the international level” makes it sound better, but just think about that.

International competition between bowmen has been around quite a while. Naturally there were no gold, silver or bronze medals given out at these earlier competitions, the entire idea being that your team slaughtered everyone on the opposing team and got to live as a reward for victory, but the principle was still nation on nation archery, and, frankly, having a few hundred people to turn up in Copenhagen for a week and claiming it as a record rather ignores some salient events of history, where far, far more bowmen turned up and “competed” with archers from abroad. Agincourt for instance.

Are The World Championships The Biggest In History?

Modern archery isn’t like that. Probably because it would be tricky to fit the many thousands of participants of a major battle in the grounds of a Copenhagen palace, but if they were to try I’d suggest you’d almost certainly find it televised more widely than will the World Archery Championships. There would be a rush to sponsor it by all the major insurance companies and ComeOn! Sportsbook would most definitely offer odds on it whatever Danish gambling laws said. Of course health and safety would throw a fit, but then don’t they always?

The problem is once you start encouraging people to involve themselves in archery, or indeed fencing, where does it end? I mean it’s all very well to have people doing the biathlon, one merely need avoid snow to make them a bunch of fools in lycra with sticks on their feet, but swords and bows? What’s next? Do we really need to drag back all the apparatus of wars gone by and turn them into sports? I always thought the javelin was in poor taste given the number of people that must have been impaled over the years, but the IOC don’t agree with me.

Apparently enjoying the sporting use of something designed originally to kill people gets easier the further from its wartime use we get. I’ve no doubt that one day the Fixed Mounted Machine Gun World Championship will be held in a field in Flanders without a trace of even a whiff of irony. Give it a few hundred more years and someone somewhere will be floating an atomic bomb championship in which teams from various countries chuck nukes about with scores for both accuracy, style and how neat the mushroom cloud is against the skyline.

Archery – A Slippery Slope?

If that all sounds ridiculous and unlikely I would just point out that people who like to bet on sports in Denmark can already wager on synchronized swimming, so apparently we are, as a species, only too willing to throw off our moral judgment and taste in the name of competition, and frankly watching repetitive nuclear detonations would be far more interesting than watching people with clothes pegs on their noses attempting not to drown whilst smiling like an air hostess on ecstasy – and possibly less harmful to the environment.

In extremis, of course, if we allow archery and the like to make a popular return, we are likely face the modern day horrors of war finally rendered as sports. The World Terrorism Championship, the Airstrike Cup, the IED Steeplechase, and, naturally, Freestyle Beheading will all eventually make their way into the sporting calendar if we permit this slide into the glorification of the methods of wars and conflicts long since gone by. Guns are responsible for so many deaths it’s ludicrous and yet there they are alongside the sprinters, pole vaulters, swimmers and rowers at the Olympics.

There are so many different sports in the world, so many varieties of competition and spectacle, of excitement and thrills that it seems just a little redundant to start recycling old methods of killing each other. That we replaced them with more efficient means, and continue to do so (just ask the US Navy about railguns), doesn’t negate them as having been responsible for death on a massive scale and it’s just a little bit in poor taste to now watch people indulge in them as if they were nothing of the sort. If you listen carefully you can hear King Harold spin in his grave.