The full-sized foam targets include most popular species of big game. Shots range from 4 yards to about 40 yards. Mellinger said they try to keep the shots as realistic to hunting as possible.

At the building’s top floor, the video-active system also tries to give shooters much of the feel of a real hunt.

For Junior Olympic practices, the 3-D targets are pushed to the side so target shooters can stretch across the width of the range.

Mellinger said he’s averaging about 35 shooters per session. Ages range from about 3 to more than 70 years old.

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Facility is on target

A temporary facility (shown here under construction) , the 93,000-square- foot archery center comprises three fields: one for the preliminary rounds and two for the medal competitions. The project provides seating for a total of 5,384 people; fans at the final-round competition field will sit in 46-foot-high stands that are the steepest of any outdoor venue. After the Olympics, the prefabricated steel frame, along with other materials, will be recycled.

South Korea’s top male and female archers capped gold medal performances at the Beijing Olympics by announcing wedding plans just as the games ended, an archery official said on Tuesday.

Park Sung-hyun, 25, who led the women’s team to a gold medal and won an individual silver in Beijing, is to marry Park Kyung-mo, 33, who had similar success at the Games.

So where do we go from here? Well, as I said, British archery has had a tremendous three years, and looking ahead, there are a good crop of youngsters waiting to break through, and snapping at the heels of the seniors in the countdown to London 2012.

U.S. men, women win 4 x 400m gold

Archery competitor Khatuna Lorig, a native of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, was chosen to carry the flag for the United States at the closing ceremonies.

Lorig didn’t medal in the Games, but learned while competing here that her homeland was the site of fighting involving Georgian and Russian forces. She worried for her friends and family.

“As an athlete, I tried to concentrate on the competition,” Lorig said. “I finally was able to talk to them and I found out they were safe.

“That helped a great deal.”

To that end, he tailored Ellison’s Olympic schedule to include spiritual and athletic objectives. “I give him six tasks a day, including reading the Bible and education,” Lee said

Susan Caldwell and her teenage daughter, Raquel, are Buddhists. Raquel is an archer who trained at the national training center, and Susan tells the New York Times she has complaints about Lee’s methods.

“To me,” she said, “it felt like those who were Christian were favored, and those who were not were almost not acknowledged.”

Hoyt Helix 900CX archery bow

As part of its Olympic build-up, the BBC asked British archers to fire arrows at fruit dangling on strings. The watermelon and apple were easy. Then the archers faced a bigger – or smaller – challenge: a single grape. But the tiny fruit barely twitched as Charlotte Burgess sent an arrow straight through it, using a Hoyt.

Bows by the American firm have accounted for more than 75 per cent of all Olympic archery medals since 1972. Key to their success are the “limbs” or blades, made of the same flexible yet crush-proof “syntactic foam” used by the US Navy inside the dive planes or “wings” of some of its nuclear submarines.

Before Beijing, the British team travelled to a lab in Germany to record their shots using high-speed cameras. The team reviewed their shots in ultra-slow motion and made minute adjustments to ensure that nothing brushes their arrows when they are released from the bow at 150mph.

There’s been a few ups and downs for me personally from the opening qualifying for the team event to beating the Athens Olympic champion in the individual event.

I started off well in the team competition last weekend but one bad dozen on the fourth end left me in 21st place, but it was my best score of the season so far so I was happy with my performance.

“It was difficult emotionally, maybe tomorrow I’ll feel that I won the gold medal,” said Ruban with the first ever Olympic archery gold.

Before the last arrow, the two archers came to a tie, both in 103. Ruban nailed his last arrow to ten first, leaving Park no choice but a ten to prolong the tussle. Park scored only a nine to lose the Games’ final.

“In our country, we don’t work with a psychologist, we only work on the technical side of things. We work on the psychological side ourselves to be focused at exactly the right moment,” added the Ukraine.

“I knew certainly he had the upper hand but I knew that if I had a good round I could take him,” Wunderle said. “It hadn’t been my best season this year and I saved my best performance for the Games. I think everybody coming after me in my bracket is very thankful that I opened up the pathway.”