Pan Am podium in her sights

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This article was published 24/07/2019 (2569 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bryanne Lameg hasn’t always been a straight-shooter… In archery, at least.

The 19-year-old has come a long way since beginning competitive archery. Next week, she’s headed to Lima, Peru, to compete in the 2019 Pan Am Games. However, Lameg was very frank in admitting that it’s been a winding road for her to get where she is today.

“I never fully intended to compete at all. I didn’t really have goals like ‘oh, go to nationals’ or ‘oh, go to worlds.’ It was more so that I just enjoyed the sport,” Lameg said.

Growing up as a competitive martial artist, it was completely by chance that Lameg tried out archery for the first time. About five years ago, a friend from her martial arts class asked her if she wanted to try out archery — just for fun.

In the time it took the first arrow to release from Lameg’s bow, the teen says she knew she was in love with the sport.

“One thing that I really, really liked about it is the accountability that you have to hold yourself to. It’s very similar to martial arts, despite being a zero-contact sport. The mentality and the discipline in the training is all so similar. Any errors that you have are all on you,” Lameg said.

A couple years ago, Lameg made the tough decision to leave martial arts behind, knowing the advanced techniques she was beginning to use could really affect her performance in archery.

“We were getting into more of the grappling, holds and stuff like that, so it wasn’t really good to be competing in archery when I was doing martial arts and practising holds, because I’d risk injury, of course,” she said.

Even Lameg admits that she’s surprised herself with how far she’s come in the sport, especially since she’d originally planned to do it simply for fun.

“I started really, because I wanted to go hunting, but then I got pulled into competitions and now here we are,” Lameg said.

The closest thing she’s done to hunting so far is fishing, but Lameg says that after recently picking up a job at Heartland Archery — where she also trains — her co-workers have been very supportive of her wanting to learn a new aspect of the sport.

“I asked some of my co-workers if they’d take me out hunting, since they all have the experience. They all said yes, so now I’m looking forward to going hunting this fall and seeing how my target skills pay off there.”

After first trying out archery in 2014, Lameg competed in her first national competition just two months into shooting. The green shooter just missed the podium in that competition, earning a respectable fourth-place finish.

‘I want to put up a fight. Forget just handing the medal over to the person who gets first, I want to really give them a fight’ — archer Bryanne Lameg

But it hasn’t always been an easy road for the teen, who’s also an Asper School of Business student at the University of Manitoba.

“2017 for me was absolutely, heart-wrenchingly bad. I did not shoot well at all, I didn’t make any teams and overall the year was just really bad. But it was all just myself. I didn’t perform as well as I wanted because I didn’t practise how I needed to.”

Even a poor year of performance didn’t deter Lameg from pursuing the sport she loved. In 2018, the archer came back with a vengeance. She won a team silver at the 2018 World Indoor Archery Championships and won bronze at the 2018 Pan Am Games primary qualification tournament.

In preparation for Lima next week, Lameg is training every day, shooting anywhere from 250-300 arrows per day.

“If I don’t shoot every day, it’ll show. When you’re competing at the level that we’re at, you have to be shooting on a consistent basis,” she said.

“I really, really want to do well and have a good showing at Pan Am. I don’t want to go there and just absolutely suck. I want to put up a fight. Forget just handing the medal over to the person who gets first, I want to really give them a fight.”

And if the roster of archers headed to the Games this year doesn’t make it apparent enough, Lameg is definitely right in saying there’s going to be some new, stiff competition.

This includes Colombian compound archer, Sara Lopez. She’s earned four World Archery Cup Champion titles since 2014, along with dozens of other accolades. But, like Lameg, this will be Lopez’s first time at the Pan Am Games.

While recurve archery has been a Pan Am Games and Olympic sport for years, this is the first time in history that compound archery has been included in the list of Pan Am Games sports.

Recurve archery essentially includes the traditional bow and arrow that comes to mind when people generally think about the sport. It requires a little more physical strength than compound archery, which includes a more complex bow system of pulleys and cables.

The addition of compound archery this year is giving a whole new crop of competitors, including Lameg and Lopez, the opportunity to compete at an international, multi-sport competition.

“(Lopez) has been number 1 for the past four or five years now. Last year alone she didn’t lose a single match. To think that I’m competing against someone at that level, among others, it’s crazy.”

Since the Pan Am Games only includes a senior archery category — ages 21 and over — Lameg will be competing up an age bracket next week. In other archery competitions she can still qualify for the junior category, which is 20 and under.

“Anyone who’s anyone is in the senior category, essentially,” she said. “I’m just happy to be going there. Anything on top of that would be absolutely amazing. I’ve obviously been training hard and look forward to doing the absolute best I possibly can.”

devon.shewchuk@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @devonshewchuk