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Bangladesh in as first-ever Olympic mixed team line-up decided

23 July 2021

Tokyo, Japan

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Ruman Shana shooting during practice at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

We now know which 16 pairs will compete for the first-ever Olympic title in the mixed team event.

Korea, USA, Japan, Mexico, China, the Netherlands, Turkey, Chinese Taipei, India, ROC, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, France, Indonesia and, excitingly, Bangladesh made the cut after Friday's qualifying rounds.

The 16th seeds courtesy Ruman Shana’s 662 and Diya Siddique’s 635, Bangladesh was given a women’s universality invitation to these Games, upgrading their single men’s quota, which is what allowed the country to compete in this pairs event.

No matter how they got here – the partnership beat experienced duos from Canada, Malaysia, Brazil and Moldova, among others, to book a ticket in the eliminations, where they will face the favourites in the first round.

“This is really amazing and a happy moment. At first, we were thinking it would be too hard for us. Finally, we’re in the 16th position, and it’s really awesome. We’re feeling so excited and so happy,” said Shana, the individual bronze medallist at the last world championships.

“We’re not worried about Korea. We’ll shoot normally and see what happens in the match.”

Mixed teams are ranked on the combined total of their highest-scoring man and highest-scoring woman.

The qualified nations had until one hour after the end of the men’s ranking round to make changes to their line-up for matchplay. Only two squads chose to make a switch.

China swapped out Yang Xiaolei for Wu Jiaxin and Li Jialun for Wang Dapeng.

France replaced 36th individual seed Pierre Plihon with 57th-ranked Jean-Charles Valladont to partner with reigning European Champion Lisa Barbelin. The line-up was, apparently, decided weeks ago – but it remains a bold decision, given that had Valladont’s qualifying score (640) been used rather than that of Plihon (653), the French pair would have missed the cut and been eliminated.

The mixed team event is making its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020, bringing the total number of available archery medals to five.

Korea’s An San and Kim Je Deok, two young debutants at the Games, claimed the number one seed, having both topped the individual men’s and women’s qualifying rounds.