T&T, represented by three male and two female archers secured four spots for next year’s CAC Games after an overall impressive showing at the recently concluded Archery World Cup in Medallin, Colombia.
The World Cup was the first qualifying event for the CAC Games, and will be followed by the second and final qualifier in Guatemala next May, where T&T’s recurve archers will attempt to qualify for the main event in Mexico.
Among the feats recorded by the T&T archers in last week’s event was a new national record of 229 points (out of a maximum 240) in a narrow runner-up finish to Venezuela.
The successful men’s team included George Vire, Rakesh Sookoo and Hasmath Ali. T&T also landed one female compound place for the CAC Games.
Following their successes in the team events, the archers moved onto the individual elimination event, where they competed for ten available places. Sookoo won his encounter with Barbados’ Richard Morris 139-133, before Ali scraped past Costa Rica’s Juan Carlos Solano in a shoot-off. Solano also qualified with a ninth spot, while Vire secured the tenth with the same score as Ali and Solano.
The female compound matches were equally exciting with Cezair shooting another national record of 136 (out of a possible 150) to overcome Teresa Abreu of the Dominican Republic in her first match. Cezair and three other archers advanced to the final stage to shoot for the three places available in this division. Cezair lost to Sabrina Hermes of Guatemala.
However, the two losing women had shot the same score and went into a 15 arrow shoot-out to secure the final qualifying place.
The match between Cezair and Espinal was a nervous affair, and eventually wound down to the last three arrows with the T&T archer just a few points behind. Cezair subsequently held her nerve and shot three nines. Espinal shot slower and recorded two tens with her first arrows, but with the clock running down could not reproduce this and shot a poor arrow which saw Cezair win 130-125 to secure the last spot for T&T.
T&T’s only other female archer Samantha Jagesar shot well in her quarter-final match but exited to eventual winner Sabrina Hermes, 127-113.