http://arabnews.com/sports/article198915.ece
SKorea's golden archer can barely see target South Korean archer Im Dong-hyun lines up a shot during the men's team competition where he won gold at the Asian Games in Guangzhou. (AP) By ERIC TALMADGE | AP Published: Nov 23, 2010 18:17 Updated: Nov 23, 2010 18:22 GUANGZHOU, China: When Im Dong-hyun was a teenager his eyesight began to deteriorate. Im had been an archer since he was 10. He had mastered the technique and proven himself to be one of the best South Korea had to offer - and that in a country that boasts some of the top archers in the world. But as Im's vision got fuzzier, he was losing the ability to actually see what he was shooting at. Im's vision hasn't gotten any better. But he is still winning golds. Im, now 25, shared the gold medal with his South Korean teammates at the Asian Games, and is expected to be a force to be reckoned with at the 2012 London Olympics. At the age of 18, he was the youngest Olympic champion in Games history when his team won in Athens. That was a year after his vision started to worsen. He was a double gold winner in individual and team at the 2006 Doha Asian Games, and won gold in team archery in the 2004 - where he set a world record in the 72-arrow individual event - and the 2008 Olympics. Time Magazine named him one of the top 100 athletes to watch in Beijing. Im says that when he looks down the range at the target, all he can do is try to distinguish between the different colors. Yellow is the highest score, followed by red, blue, black and white. "If I couldn't see the colors, now that would be a problem," he said, according to the Asian Games news service. Im could improve his vision with glasses. But he refuses to wear corrective lenses or contacts, and has turned down offers for free surgery to correct his sight loss - which is now 20/200 in his left eye, meaning he perceives something 20 feet away about as well as a perfectly sighted person would be able to see at 200 feet. Archers shoot at a distance of 70 meters, so that would appear to be almost 2,300 feet away for Im. That just meets the definition of legal blindness, although the US National Federation of Blindness qualifies that to add 20/200 is the lower limit for sight with the best possible corrective lenses, which Im doesn't use. Instead, Im has become accustomed to shooting at what he does see - a fuzzy yellow blob down range - and doesn't want to change what he is used to. Working in Im's favor is the nature of the sport. Although visual acuity is certainly a plus, archery is a sport of consistency and precision. Each shot must be lined up just right, and the flow of the drawback and release must be carried out in the same way time after time, shot after shot. Im, who has said he relies on "feeling" each shot with his body, has the ability to be amazingly consistent, sending his shots to the right place despite his inability to see exactly where that is. He says he has been able to cover for his poor vision by training extra hard. In his competition here, he said his eyesight wasn't an issue. "My vision problems didn't cause me any inconvenience to my shooting," he said. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Post message: prole...@egroups.com Subscribe : proletar-subscr...@egroups.com Unsubscribe : proletar-unsubscr...@egroups.com List owner : proletar-ow...@egroups.com Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: proletar-dig...@yahoogroups.com proletar-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: proletar-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
