Patrick Huston aiming to repeat 2024 indoor form after missing out on Olympics

With Paris 2024 now over, Patrick Huston will be hoping to carry his fine form from the indoors last year into the 2025 season.

Huston did travel to Paris for Great Britain but only as a reserve, with compatriots Conor Hall, Tom Hall and Alex Wise selected instead to represent the nation on the men’s side.

Paris 2024 would’ve been Huston’s third Olympic Games following Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, where he reached the quarterfinals, but the Northern Irish man will have to wait until 2028 to see if he can compete once again on archery’s biggest stage.

Despite having to watch the action in Paris from the sidelines though, Huston believes it marked huge progress within the sport thanks to the changed Olympic qualifying procedure that allows more archers to reach Games through their world ranking.

“I think it’s rather impressive to watch the standard that the top guys are at and how many people are increasing the size of that peloton behind them,” said the 28-year-old. “This new system is really effective. It’s basically putting the best, most competitive people up against each other at the Olympics.”

“It leaves things a little late but that’s just the nature of sport and how things go. But it has really meant that everyone competing at the Olympics are not internationally competitive but internationally successful.”

After already competing in two Olympic Games and other major events, Huston believes this experience gives him the best chance of performing in the indoor season and other competitions.

“I am absolutely thinking about it,” he said when asked how much pressure he feels to reach another Olympics. “You need to know the goals you’re going to achieve.”

“I’ve had some issues with injury over a little while but now that I’m back to fitness and back to performing, I can go into the (next) Olympic season knowing I can do it.”

“Let’s see how it goes.”

This year, Huston has also been homing in on his hand training workouts that he’s adopted recently. 

The Olympian always had an interest in the human body but educated himself on it further following his diagnosis of Lime’s disease in 2019 which is now, “under control”, he said.

Since then, his intrigue in the subject has led him to taking up specific hand exercises based off physiological studies to improve his archery skills.

“I had a number of finger issues in the past, but they’re all gone now,” explained Huston.

“The distal extremities are connected to the proximal and how congruent those are is massively influential to how you perform under pressure.”

“I’m really enjoying exploring that and training it.”

An online gym that inspired Huston was the Athletic Truth Group which he regularly practices from and labelled it as “incredible”.

“It’s about creating athletic range, fundamental balance with all the joints in the body and then moving out to those strength curves within a full range motion,” Huston stated.

“It’s incredible the difference it can make”.

Huston is also focused on sharing his wisdom with the next generation of archers and regularly posts coaching tips on his Instagram.

Now, he wants to follow the footsteps of USA archer Jake Kaminski, a two-time team silver medallist from London 2012 and Rio 2016, who boasts a YouTube channel of over 90,000 subscribers. 

Since moving into his new house earlier this year, Huston has set up a recording studio and insisted that his own YouTube content is “coming up”. 

“Jake Kaminski has done an incredible job for people starting off in the sport and it’s lovely to see so many people learn so much from him.”

“If I can position myself as the British alternative to Jake, then I’d really like that.”

It’s not just YouTube though Huston has been working on in the background. Coaching has also taken up a lot of his time recently with the Yankton 2022 World Archery Field Championship bronze medallist developing his programme ‘Huston Archery‘ which aims to teach all levels of archers in person and online as well as putting group and individual training plans together for athletes.

“The educational content I’m working on is definitely something I’m rather excited to be working on,” said Huston, who is hoping to publish his business’ brand new website in the near future.

“My coaching business has come on really nicely. I’ve got a lot of athletes making some fantastic progress and that’s incredibly exciting to work with and incredibly rewarding and motivational to see the athletes I’m teaching.”

“I look forward to taking those lessons and those ideas that I use have verified success with in teaching athletes and bringing them to people through more educational content.”

Missing out on an Olympic Games is the most excruciating of feelings for any athlete, there is not many worse feelings particularly for someone of Huston’s quality.

But the Briton is not deterred, fully dedicated to giving back to the sport he so dearly loves and buoyed for his fourth another Olympic cycle.