Mexico’s Lucia Valeria Chavarria, seeded 12th, shot for gold at Ankara 2016 against Cassidy Cox, who was a member of the USA team that won a youth world team title in Yankton in the summer of 2015.
Tied after the first end at 28 points each, Cassidy started the second with a 10, Lucia with a nine.
But disaster struck Cox’s cause. She fumbled with her arrow as she tried to draw up on her second shot of the end.
“The arrow kept coming off the rest as I drew back, and I was getting really frustrated,” second seeded Cassidy explained. “The time kept going down and I didn’t think I would actually run out of time, but I did.”
With the arrow recording as a miss, and despite a closing 10 from Cox, Chavarria suddenly had a nine-point advantage in the match. She kept her arrows in the middle, cruising to the end of the 15-arrow clash and a junior world champion title.
“This was my first international event and it was great. I actually didn’t expect to do so well,” she said. “I was scared to shoot the finals, but I won!”
Chavarria had nothing but sympathy for Cox.
“I felt sorry for Cassidy because during the qualifiers in Mexico I also had a miss and I know how you can feel in the moment. She’s a great archer and she managed to get all the way through until the end,” the 15-year-old Mexican archer added.
Cox’s USA teammate, Athena Caipoulos, beat host national representative Evrim Saglam to compound junior women’s bronze at the 12th World Archery Indoor Championships.
“I was getting stressed out because of the cameras, the lights and all the professional aspects of the competition, but I’m really happy about how it turned out. I got a lot more confident in the third end,” Athena, also shooting in her first international, said.
