World Archery Athlete of the Year 2015 results: Recurve men

Kim Woojin collected the recurve men’s World Archery Athlete of the Year 2015 Award at the World Archery Gala in Las Vegas on Friday 29 January 2016. He was voted top of a five-athlete shortlist by the general public and World Archery’s awards panel. The shortlist was proposed by national archery federations and archery experts.

Here are the full results…

1. Kim Woojin  – 23%

Kim Woojin made his international debut with the Korean team back in 2009, but 2015 has been his best season by far.

In both Shanghai and Antalya, the only two stages of the World Cup he competed at last year, Woojin won a total of six out of six possible medals – taking either silver or gold in the individual, mixed team and recurve men’s team events. These results put him on top of the Archery World Cup rankings and into a confirmed first seed for Mexico City.

In Mexico, he finished third individually and won gold in the mixed team with Choi Misun.

Bigger than that in his application for Athlete of the Year, though, was Woojin’s claiming of the World Archery Championships and Aquece Rio Olympic Test Event gold, where he parted with a warning to his fellow competitors ahead of Rio 2016… 

“All athletes should be careful, I’m the best in the competition.”

2. Luis Alvarez  – 22%

Luis Alvarez picked up the biggest win of his career when he took the recurve men’s gold at Toronto 2015 Pan American Games by defeating three-time Archery World Cup Final Champion Brady Ellison from the USA. Most memorable if you caught up on international competition on Archery TV in 2015 would be the fight he put up against World Archery Champion, and number one on this list, Kim Woojin – on home soil, in front of a home crowd, at Mexico City 2015.

3. Sjef van den Berg  – 21%

Twenty-year old Sjef van den Berg started his ongoing Olympic campaign strong, finishing second at the first European Games in Baku – a performance he repeated just a few months later at the Aquece Rio Olympic Test Event.

During the World Archery Championships in Copenhagen, Sjef finished in the top-ten in both individual and team competitions, while being part of the three-man team that secured a full quota to Rio.

4. Jean-Charles Valladont  – 17%

One bronze in the recurve men’s team in Antalya, one individual gold in Wroclaw and two top-ten mixed team finishes, in both Wroclaw and Medellin, secured JC Valladont a place at the World Cup Final in Mexico City. There, the unmistakable form of a determinted Valladont secured silver.

Check out his semifinal shoot-off.

5. Miguel Alvarino Garcia  – 17%

Shooting internationally for only two years, Miguel burst to the top of the elite archery scene with a win at the first European Games in Baku.

He said he would be “taking things easy” after that, while picking up top-10 finish after top-10 finish, as he qualified for his first Archery World Cup Final, then beat Lee Seungyun from Korea, USA’s Collin Klimitchek and French JC Valladont to win that as well!