Yenihayat and Chen take top seeds as the Youth Olympic Games open
Qualification at the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games produced a new Games record on day one. Türkiye's Dunya Yenihayat shot 688 with 24 Xs in the under-18 recurve ranking round at Abdoulaye Wade Stadium on Friday 6 November, according to World Archery's report, and took the top seed in the girls' event.
Yenihayat is 17 and already a Mediterranean Games gold medallist, having won at Taranto 2026. World Archery's preview listed her as the highest-ranked woman in the field, at world number 34. She said afterwards that the competition "went very well" for her.
The margin at the top was thin. World Archery's report indicates that Korea's Kim Sumin also shot 688, with 18 Xs, and that India's Gatha Anandrao Khadake was on 687. Those three scores sit within a single point of each other over a 72-arrow round, so the X-count is doing the work of separating seeds. Khadake is India's only entry in the event. Spain's Sandra Perez Cumbreras scored 673, which the report places fourth.
In the boys' event, Chen Pin-An of Chinese Taipei took the top seed on 688 with 15 Xs. Ismail Ezzeldin of Egypt, the 2026 African under-18 champion, also shot 688, with four fewer Xs than Chen. Ezzeldin described the occasion as "great" for his first Olympic arrows. Türkiye's Muhammet Musab Gulay posted 673.
In the mixed team ranking, which feeds the team bracket on the final day, Korea was the only team ranked above Türkiye, the report says.
Why it matters: seeding decides the bracket. A top seed meets the 64th-ranked archer in the first round, and ranking-round scores this close mean a single lost arrow in a set can reorder the field before eliminations begin. For a competition where most archers are shooting their first Olympic arrows, the 688s also set a high bar for the finals days.
A father's dream in the UAE's seventh seed
World Archery also profiled Khalifa Musabeh Alkaabi, a 16-year-old recurve archer from Al Madam in the United Arab Emirates, who qualified seventh with 677. His father introduced him to the sport after seeing his cousins do well in it, and Alkaabi says his father hoped to see him win an Olympic gold medal.
His route to Dakar was gradual. He was first picked for the UAE under-18 squad for the 2023 World Archery Youth Championships in Limerick at 13, and lost in the first round at several international events that followed. The change came under head coach Lee Young Chul of South Korea, who arrived in 2024 and moved him to 70 metres alongside 60 metres, reworking his training, technique and mindset. In 2026 he reached the quarter-finals of Veronica's Cup and won two matches at the European Youth Cup in Ruse. He was also the UAE's only male recurve archer at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games. His first-round opponent on Saturday is Yugveer Jagadish Bissessur of Mauritius.
Kroppen signs the Olympian Wall in Lausanne
Away from Dakar, Germany's Michelle Kroppen signed the Olympian Wall at Olympic House in Lausanne on 5 November. The wall is described by World Archery as a living record of Olympic history. Kroppen won women's team bronze at Tokyo 2020 and mixed team silver with Florian Unruh at Paris 2024, and she was part of the German women's team that won the 2023 World Archery Championships in Berlin. She was in Lausanne after the Swiss Open, and Spain's compound archer Andrea Munoz accompanied her. Mexico's Alejandra Valencia, Ana Paula Vazquez and Angela Ruiz signed in June, and Juan Rene Serrano signed in October.
A recurve-only Games
Archery in Dakar is recurve only, with no compound event. The programme is under-18 men's and women's individual events plus a mixed team event, shot by 64 archers from 39 countries, according to World Archery's preview. Each nation could hold a maximum of two quota places, awarded through an open ranking system with a minimum qualification score. It is only the fourth Youth Olympic Games; the 2022 edition was postponed to 2026. For context on how the field was built, see our earlier preview of the Dakar field.
What to watch
Eliminations are on Saturday 7 November, and the men's finals follow on Sunday 8 November. The women's finals are on Monday 9 November and the mixed team finals on Tuesday 10 November. Watch whether the 688 seeds survive the early rounds, how Korea's mixed team handles Türkiye, and whether the first-time Olympians at the bottom of the draw can take sets off the top seeds. Olympic Broadcasting Services is producing coverage, with live scores on the World Archery website.