I now have the biggest man-crush on this guy. Lars Andersen you beautiful bastard, thank you for giving us the gift of opening our eyes to how master archery really looks like and just proving to every-fucking-one how bloody awesome archery is even in this day an age. [YOUTUBE]BEG-ly9tQGk[/YOUTUBE]
Pretty cool. My dad used to take me to an archery ring till I came out and now he doesn't anymore I wasn't that good anyway.
I mean... And then near the end of the video when he turned around shoot an arrow that split an incoming arrow mid-fligt in half
"Some consider this to be the ultimate archery trick. They're wrong." Okay, I think this already won "coolest thing I've seen all decade" and nothing else will take the title.
I took an archery class with my high school for a couple of weeks my junior year. I was pretty good. We used our schools tennis courts and set up a range. One of my rounds I shot a bullseye, another bullseye, and the final one missed the target completely went out of the tennis courts and nearly hit a squirrel. Our teacher looked at me and said " What happened?" and I told him "SQUIRREL!"
I loved archery the few times I've tried it! I really want to work at a school with an archery club so I can join! XD
Very nice demonstration, except... I and many other people around the world practice these traditional archery styles. Basically all Asian archery styles use the arrow on the same side as the drawing arm (no risers, just the thumb or even a "siper" - wooden tool for short arrows to sit inside), not just Arab but Turkish, Caucasian, Indian, Iranian, Mongolian, Bhutanese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. These styles weren't all lost (even the English Longbow has never died out), and Lars Anderson is not a unique genius who found some hidden information. Stephen Selby wrote an excellent book on Chinese archery, and the Japanese and Koreans have many masters who are descended from generations of archers. Lars is very skilled, but I would like to know really how heavy the draw weight is on that bow. He barely draws fully, which will lead to fatigue. /archerrant Example: Yabusame, Japanese Horse Archery [youtube]Zy-ITFpaR3I[/youtube]
Archery is so fucking cool. I want to buy a bow, but I can't find a good adult one. I've only been able to find children's ones. There is this one vendor at one of the cons I go to that makes high quality custom ones made of wood, which I really really really want but they're so expensive and I can't afford to spend that much on a bow.
Yep, bows are sweet. I've got a jr. compound, but even as it is made for kids (35# draw), it feels pretty powerful at short range. For a long time I've wanted a traditional wooden one. Maybe not an English style longbow, but a medieval-ish recurve at least. The combination of strength and precision needed to draw back an arrow and nail a target at distance is an exhilarating experience.
I can't see the video on my phone, but splitting an arrow? Honestly I doubt that's legit because splitting an arrow, especially in flight is physically impossible. Even though there's an idiom that says "straight as an arrow" arrows do not actually fly straight, they flex incessantly and they simply don't fly straight enough to split an arrow. They just kinda veer of, maybe taking a splinter of the arrow with it as it passes. Mythbusters even tested it I think three times because people kept claiming it worked. They tried and tried and tried but the physics just aren't there. I love archery, though. I used to do it every week when I still lived at home but there's no archery range where I live now.
He split something that resembles and functions like an arrow then, because that's definitely in the vid (which you can watch directly on YouTube if you follow this link btw).
I watched it a couple of hours ago. I still don't believe it and I'm just about certain that part was completely fake. The physics of splitting something so thin and flexible with an arrow just do not work, the arrows would just deflect each other. It's 100% possible to be able to deflect another arrow with your arrow, but not splitting it. Just doing that is really impressive though and I have no reason to disbelieve anything else in the video. He's still a really impressive archer. Though he's wrong in saying this is how archers used to shoot. The average archer was just about competent of firing in the enemy's general direction. Most armies simply couldn't afford training their archers this way. Some armies did train their archers really hard though and there's a reason they were often very succesful, like the Mongolian horseback archers or roman horse cart archers.
Same here! It's a sport/hobby I've pondered taking up again. Plus, it also seems so much more classy than guns, which to me are way too noisy, ugly and conjure up too many images of rabid NRA sorts.