Above: Mike and Jan Willrich celebrate their achievements with friends and colleagues at Border Archery.
Husband and wife duo Mike and Janice Willrich are among the world's finest flight archers. Indeed, they are probably archery's most successful couple, with an incredible 50 world flight records between them. Here Mike tells us about his love of flight archery, and encourages all members to give it a go.
Flight archery is sometimes called the Formula One of archery, where improvements in bow and arrow design and material development have contributed to increased distances over the years. It is the same principle as the development of F1 cars, which, over the years, mean that they go much faster. Modern target archers owe a lot to flight archery, which has led to the development of the more efficient composite recurve bow and the carbon arrow.
I took up flight archery by default. I had a problem with my bow arm which meant I was unable to shoot 144 arrows each day for the double FITA Star events. Turning to flight as an alternative was the best thing I have done - it turned me into a world record breaking archer!
After shooting arrows for 21 years, I had to look around for an alternative to shooting 12 dozen arrows in a day. Shooting six arrows in four classes at 45 degrees for flight was fine. So in 1989 I entered the National Flight Championships, and won the Unlimited Target Bow Class with 437 yards, which was then a British Record. I have since won that event every year since, and my current British Record is 618 yards. Over the past 15 years, I have competed six times at the International Flight Championships in the USA, and have 29 first place medals to my credit, of which I'm very proud. My wife, Janice, who took up flight archery 13 years ago, also has 29 first place medals. The Drake Medal is the top award for flight archery, and only awarded at those USA championships to an archer who breaks a World Record. Janice and I have 23 Drake Flight Medals between us, and we are very proud of this. At Bonneville, America this August, I achieved my best ever haul of medals - five gold and a silver, plus five Drake medals for setting new World records. I also became the only male archer in the world to shoot the Grandmaster distance with a 50lb Target Bow. Together at Bonneville, Janice and I achieved a combined total of 11 gold, one silver and eight Drake medals. That's biggest haul of medals and World Records in the history of flight archery, and our proudest achievement.
As you can tell, I love flight archery, and recommend it to anyone. Nowadays, I am the organiser of the National Flight Championships and the WMAS Flight Championship, and I would like to attract sponsors for the 2011 World Record Status National Flight Championships to make sure a 63 year old championship keeps going. So if there are any prospective sponsors out there please contact me!
Mike can be contacted on 01785 250490 or mwillrich@virginmedia.com
On 25 Oct 1415, at Agincourt, Henry V's five thousand longbowmen used flight archery with devastating effect at 200-300 yards against an estimated 40thousand strong French army.
Shooting for the sole object of reaching great distances, flight archery is historically limited to the Near East in Turkey. In 1798, the Sultan Selim is reputed to have shot an arrow, with an estimated160lb Turkish flight bow an incredible 972 yards.
Arrows are shot at about 45 degrees to the horizontal, and each competitor may have an assistant to help with getting this angle right.
An average English Longbow could shoot an arrow at 136mph , the average target bow could shoot at 147mph right up to 319mph for the World Record Flight Bow and 395mph for the World Record Crossbow & Footbow.
Competitors have to shoot the arrows as far as they can and use a particular size and weight of bow and arrows that are specifically designed to fly for long periods in the air. They fire 24 arrows, then have an hour to find them. If they are broken they do not count.
For the longbow archer typical distances will be around 300 yards. For a compound flight bow this might well be just short of 1000 yards.
The furthest distance shot with any bow is 2,047 yards. This was shot by the late American archer Harry Drake in 1988, using a crossbow. Harry also set a world record with a footbow, when he shot 2,028 yards. The furthest with a hand-held and pulled bow is 1,336 yards shot by Don Brown, with an unlimited conventional flight bow in 1987.
