Kumkum Mohod’s golden 10: How India stunned Korea to win Asian Games archery gold

Indian women’s recurve team clinched a historic gold medal in Archery at the Asian Games. | Photo Credit: REUTERS

Guess which was harder for Kumkum Mohod: speaking to media persons or compensating for swirling winds and hitting the 10 ring, about the size of a compact disc, from 70 metres away on the last shot of an archery match for the chance to make history?

“ Aap logon se baat karna. Itne saare log ek saath kabhi nahi dekhe (Talking to you guys... I’ve never seen so many people together at once),” the 17-year-old would say shyly.

The attention was inevitable.

On Friday morning, in a result even David might have found a tad optimistic if you had predicted it earlier, Kumkum, alongside Ankita Bhakat and Kirti Sharma, pulled off one of the biggest heists in Indian sporting history, stunning Korea 5-3 to win women’s team gold at the Asian Games.

Coach Udham Singh screamed when the result was announced, but celebrations from the girls were a lot more muted, just fist bumps. That didn’t mean there wasn’t emotion. “I had tears in my eyes. It is my first gold medal for India,” Kirti would say later.

This is no ordinary gold medal. A Korean women’s archery team winning gold is the kind of statement that tends to follow death and taxes. The Korean women’s team is the reigning Olympic champion. It is also the only nation ever to win the Olympic women’s team recurve title. At the Asian Games, its record is only slightly more modest. It had won seven consecutive titles since 1998. Until today.

And about to overturn all that history was an Indian team comprising Ankita, a shooter battling the demons of disappointment at the Paris Games; Kirti, a 19-year-old who was studying for her second-year college exams only a few months ago; and Kumkum, who was even younger.

For Ankita, that difference in experience was significant.

“It’s different for me. I’ve been an archer for so long. The younger archers like Kumkum and Kirti are younger. They have no experience of wins and losses. They don’t have that baggage. So they are able to shoot fearlessly,” she says.

On a sunny day at Okazaki Chuo Sogo multipurpose park, the winds were light but gusted frustratingly, adding to the drama of a moment many would have considered impossible.

There were nerves.

In the first game, just when a 7 from Kirti off the penultimate arrow threatened to hand Korea a 2-0 lead, Kumkum’s inner-10 eventually saw India force a tie.

The 17-year-old came to the rescue once again in the second set as Kirti shot two eights. With a 10 required off the last attempt to pull back one point, Kumkum found the bullseye.

There was strategy.

“We worked very well as a team. At the start of the final, I was shooting first, and Kirti was shooting second. After she shot a 7, she was a little nervous. So we just switched the order for the second series to make her go first. You rarely change the order in the middle of a match, but that’s the kind of confidence we have in each other,” Ankita says.

“Kumkum is someone who is a really strong shooter. We keep her at the end because we know that when we need a big shot, she can hit a 10.”

Kirti launched the opening arrow for a 10. With a total score of 55 from the set, India took two points from the 10-time champion.

Finally, there was luck.

First-seed Korea, requiring a win in the final set to force the match into a shoot-off, established a two-point lead after the first rotation. After Kirti’s 8 was initially judged as an 8 and later revised to 9 following a review, the Udham Singh-coached India secured the much-needed point by winning the set by the barest of margins.

It didn’t matter how it happened.

As they stood on the podium, the Korean faces were glum and downcast. This was a shock like few others.

Such is the depth of talent in that nation that it’s considered harder to qualify for a Korean national women’s team than to win a team title.

After selection trials were held earlier this year, Tokyo 2020 Olympic Champion An San failed to make the team, finishing fifth in the final trial, while Paris 2024 Olympic triple gold medallist and Hangzhou 2022 Asian Games Champion Lim Sihyeon was eliminated in an earlier round.

The Korean team had enough faith in its trials to send two relatively inexperienced athletes into the competition. Lee Yun-ji and former youth World champion Oh Ye-jin were competing at the Asian Games for the first time.

The team was anchored, though, by Kang Chae Young, the Tokyo Olympic team gold medallist and reigning World individual Champion.

In contrast to that Korean team, the highest level of experience in the Indian squad was held by Ankita, and it was the worst possible kind.

The 28-year-old had reached the semifinals of the mixed team event at the Paris Olympics in 2024 and had missed both opportunities.

The daughter of a milkman from West Bengal who had struggled to send her to train on his meagre income, Ankita found the loss particularly hard.

“For some time, I was really devastated. I kept thinking I could have won a medal and my life could have changed. But then I slowly started to think that I had to keep fighting. I told myself that maybe if I had won a medal at Paris, I might have lost my focus. And maybe there was something bigger waiting for me. I had to prepare for that opportunity,” she had once told Sportstar.

That opportunity was waiting for her in Nagoya.

And thousands of kilometres away, someone else had been waiting for it too.

“Yesterday my mother spent the whole day doing puja at Kalighat mandir. She fasted the entire day. She finally broke her fast today,” Ankita says.

It was waiting for Kumkum and Kirti too.

Kumkum, whose father makes packaging for sweet boxes, grew up in Amravati, Maharashtra. “I grew up watching Korean archers. Everyone told me they were the best in the world. You watched them to study how to shoot,” she recalls.

But while there was respect, there wasn’t the awe there had been for earlier generations. Both Kumkum and Kirti have faced Korean archers at World Cup events before. Although they both lost, the scores were very close, with no one-sided blowouts.

Ankita had grown up with that same awareness of Korean supremacy. But experience had also stripped some of the mystique away.

“When I was starting my archery career, everyone knew how strong Korea were. We know how strong they are. But they aren’t any different to us. I think we have the same technique, although they release their arrows a lot faster because they have a lot of confidence. But just like Korea is a strong team, we are a strong team as well,” she says.

At the start of Friday morning, the team wasn’t even thinking about playing Korea in the finals. “Koi dar nahi tha,” asserts Kirti from Haryana, whose father took a Rs. 60,000 loan to pay for her first bow. Not only was there no fear, but the team wasn’t even thinking about who they were potentially going to face.

“We weren’t thinking about Korea or China (who the team beat earlier in the semifinals). We just wanted to do our best. If we did our best, we were confident about doing well,” Kirti says.

Kumkum, though, wasn’t interested in just doing her best. At the start of the match, as the teams were being introduced, Kumkum listened closely to the announcer. “He was saying, ‘Introducing the Korean team – 10-time Olympic champion Korea’. At that time I was thinking, they might be Olympic champions, but we are going to be Asian Games champions,” she says.

While Ankita, Kirti and Kumkum were looking to bend the arc of their careers favourably, history weighed heavily on this Korean team.

“When I heard during our preparations that Korea had won seven consecutive (Asian Games) titles, I thought I needed to work even harder and live up to those expectations, and I tried to approach the competition with more confidence,” a tearful Yun ji said after the match “I feel very sorry that we ended up bringing that run of seven consecutive titles to an end,” she said.

But perhaps no one felt the pressure more than Kang. She was expected to provide the spine to the squad and had described herself as the team’s “dependable older sister” in a recent interview with Korean media.

Kang shot scores of 7 and 9 in the first series, 8 and 8 in the third and 8 and 9 in the final.

In contrast, it was the youngest Indian, Kumkum, who stood up when she needed to.

Korea had scored 54 in their final set. India was on 43 after five arrows. Kumkum’s 10 kept India alive, with one shot pending official review. But when Kirti’s 8 was upgraded to 9, the tied set secured India’s 5-3 victory.

Just as she lifted her bow, the wind started to blow from nine o’clock to three. Kumkum compensated and aimed to the left. The arrow left her bow and landed dead centre, surrounded by yellow. It didn’t surprise Kumkum. “I’d visualised this exact moment the whole of last year. I knew I was going to hit it. I knew we were going to be Asian Games champions, “she says.