A world record falls on the first weekend India has hosted

Sheetal Devi and Rakesh Kumar shot 1400 in compound mixed team qualification at the Ahmedabad 2026 Hyundai World Archery Para Series, taking one point off the 1399 the record had stood at since Paris 2024. It is the sort of margin that decides very little on the day and quite a lot in the record book.

Devi's half of that total was a 698, a season best built on 25 tens and 26 X-rings, and enough to take the compound women's top seed by ten clear points. It also moved her own Asian record up by a single point. The 10-point cushion matters more than the record does: seeding that far ahead means she avoids the higher seeds until very late in the bracket, and in a discipline where qualification scores cluster inside a handful of points, ten is a wide road.

Kumar's 702 was a career best in its own right, though it left him second in the compound men's ranking round behind Ken Swagumilang of Indonesia, whose 704 included 23 X-rings. Toman Kumar took third on 696, giving India two of the top three men's seeds alongside the women's leader.

The scoring depth ran further down the field than the headline numbers suggest. Aizada Seidan of Kazakhstan posted a career-best 688 with 17 X-rings for second in the compound women's round. Phoebe Paterson Pine, the Tokyo 2020 champion for Great Britain, was fifth on 681. Payal Nag, the first quadruple amputee archer to compete at this level, scored 654 for 14th.

In the doubles seedings, Kumar and Toman Kumar led the men's on 1398, and Devi paired with Lalpati to top the women's on 1368.

Ahmedabad is the third stage of the 2026 Para Series and the first the country has staged. Qualification-round scoring at this level is a study in consistency rather than peaks — 698 over 72 arrows is a mean that leaves almost no room for a dropped end.

An archer at full draw against an open sky Compound qualification rounds are decided by consistency across 72 arrows rather than single spectacular ends. Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash.

Also this week

Rahimi equals a career best at 48

Gholamreza Rahimi of Iran topped the recurve men's ranking round in Ahmedabad with 647, matching his career best and his strongest qualification since 2023. The former world number one finished six points ahead of Kholidin of Indonesia on 641, with Harvinder Singh of India third on 636 and Samuel Molina of Mexico fourth on 633.

In the recurve women's round, Noviera Ross of Indonesia took the top seed with a career-best 603, one point clear of Iran's Somayeh Rahimi Ghahderijan on 602. Bhawna of India was third on 595.

The World Cup Final lands in Saltillo

The Hyundai Archery World Cup Final runs on 12 and 13 September in Saltillo, Mexico, closing a season that began in Puebla in April and passed through Shanghai, Antalya and Madrid. Thirty-two archers qualified, either by winning a stage outright or on ranking points, and several original qualifiers have been replaced by the next names on the list after being called into national preparation camps for the Asian Games.

The format is a straight elite-eight knockout in each of compound men, compound women, recurve men and recurve women. Compound finals go at 10:00 local time on both days (16:00 UTC), recurve at 14:00 (20:00 UTC). Coverage is on archery+ worldwide, with regional pickup by BeIN, CCTV, Claro Sports, Globo and RTVE among others.

Archery confirmed for the 2029 World Games

The International World Games Association has published the full sports programme for Karlsruhe 2029, and archery is on it with seven medal events and a quota of 100 athletes. The split follows the model used in Chengdu in 2025: compound archers shoot target, recurve and barebow archers shoot field. That is six individual titles across the three divisions plus a compound mixed team event. The Games run 19 to 29 July 2029, with roughly 4,000 athletes across 36 sports, and the qualification window opens on 1 January 2027.

What to watch

The immediate business is Saltillo. A World Cup Final is a small, unforgiving field — eight archers per category, no ranking round to hide behind, and one bad end ends a season. Watch how the archers who came straight from Asian Games preparation camps hold up against those who have been shooting competitively all summer; the replacement list suggests a fair few of the year's form archers chose the camp over the final.

Beyond that, the barebow line in the World Games announcement is worth noting. Barebow has spent years as the discipline everyone shoots and nobody televises. A guaranteed field archery slot at a multi-sport games in 2029, with a qualification period opening in early 2027, gives it a competitive pathway it has not had.

Sources