Magnifying Glass Helps South Korea Win Archery Gold
Sometimes, at the very top level, there is almost nothing to separate two teams. That's why we have penalty shoot-outs in soccer and photo finishes in races.
But officials at the Olympics needed to use a magnifying glass to decide that South Korea's women's archery team had done enough to win the gold medal.
South Korea's women narrowly beat China to win its 10th straight gold medal — South Korean archers have won gold at every Games since the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
But in Paris it was so, so close.
The score was tied in the final, forcing a shoot-out. The score appeared to be tied again after the shoot-out, until an official checked with the magnifying glass.
Archers can score between 0 and 10 points for each arrow, depending on how close it goes to the center of the target.
At first, Jeon Hun-young and Lim Si-hyeon were both ruled to have scored 9 with their arrows but asterisks were placed next to their scores because they were very close to the line between 9 and 10.
That's why a magnifying glass was needed. If an arrow is touching the line that separates two circles in the target, the archer gets the points from the higher-scoring zone.
So after the official checked, both South Korean archers were given 10 instead of 9 on their shots, giving South Korea a 29-27 win in the shoot-out and a 5-4 win overall.
Jeon said that when it came to a shoot-out, they tried not to think too much about it. "We have this teamwork, and we only focus on what we can do in the moment, and we don't worry too much."
China had high hopes for the Games after defeating South Korea at the Archery World Cup in 2023, but they admitted they were happy to have taken the match to a shoot-out.
Mexico defeated the Netherlands to take the bronze medal.
