▲ Korean female archers, who won the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, are delighted with medals at the awards ceremony.

Korean women's archery has maintained the strongest position internationally. In the final of the women's archery team at the recent 2020 Tokyo Olympics in Japan, the Korean national team beat the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) by 6-0, and thus won the gold medal.

As a result, the Korean women's archery team set a new record of winning nine consecutive times since the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when archery competitions were first introduced. It has maintained the world's strongest position for 33 years.

The rules of archery continued to alter in order to give other countries a chance, but nothing was to prevent the dominance of Korean women's archery. Other countries have long recruited Korean leaders to teach their players to learn Korean archery, but they have not been able to catch up with the South Korean team.

Media around the world have made great efforts to find out the reason behind Korean women's archery being strong.

First of all, there is a view that the use of chopsticks is the secret behind Korean women's archery. Thomas Fredman, a sports columnist for the New York Times, said in his column published in the Golf Digest in April 2019, "The reason why Korean players are good at golf is that they have used chopsticks a lot since they were young." As a result, the development of hand muscles is the reason why they show strength in exercise that requires good use of hands.

However, Korea is not the only country in the East that uses chopsticks. About 1.5 billion people in Japan, China, and Southeast Asia eat using some forms similar to chopsticks. Although chopsticks made of metal such as gold, silver, and copper are used only in Korea, the rest of the world uses wooden chopsticks; Metal chopsticks are more advantageous for hand muscle development because they are slippery and thinner than wooden chopsticks, which proves the point of how Korea is significantly performing better than all the Asian countries in archery.

Korean female athletes are also showing the best skills in the world in other sports fields like golf, which also requires a lot of hand use. The logic of good archery due to the development of hand muscles using chopsticks does not seem to be very strange in this case too. However, this alone cannot fully explain the secret of Korean women's archery. As the team achieved its ninth consecutive win at the Tokyo Olympics this year, South Korean media are considering fairness in selecting players as its strength.

When selecting Korean national archery players, all players start at the same starting line. There is no preferential treatment for a player who won a gold medal or ranked first in the world in the past Olympics. Even an Olympic gold medalist cannot become a representative if he fails to go up from the bottom level. Even players who do not rank in the top 100 in the world due to lack of international stage experience can be selected as representative players if they perform well in domestic selection matches.

Therefore, teenagers and 40s were selected as representatives for the national team. Players had to pull their arrows at least 3,000 times per player as they competed for the national team's starting position. Naturally, it became a strong practice.

The Washington Post praised the history of Korean archery as an "attractive and ruthless dynasty."

By Siyeong Im