Taipei, May 21 (CNA) Taiwanese archers edged out their highly touted South Korean rivals to win the recurve mixed team event in the first stage of the 2017 Archery World Cup in Shanghai on Sunday.
Wei Chun-heng and Tan Ya-ting combined for a score of 1,331 in the ranking contest and then topped teams from Kazakhstan, Japan and Russia before surprising the Koreans.
The South Korean team of Kim Woo-jin and Chang Hye-jin was consistently good in the final but not as dominant as some may have expected to give the Taiwanese an opening.
The Koreans won the first set 37-33, hitting two perfect 10s in their four arrows to none for Taiwan. But the Taiwanese rebounded with a near perfect second set, hitting 10s on three of their four arrows, to take the set 39-37.
The Koreans took the third set 38-37 to go up 4-2 (with a set win worth 2 points and a tie worth 1 point) in the first-to-five-point match.
Facing elimination, the Taiwanese fired a 10 on their last arrow to win the final set 37-36 and send the match into a shootout, in which each team member fires one arrow.
Taiwan won the shootout 17-16 to win the match 5-4 and take the title.
Wei, 22, won a bronze medal in the men's team recurve at the 2015 Asian Championships. Tan, 23, was part of Taiwan's bronze medal-winning women's team at the 2016 Olympics in Rio and won a gold medal in the girls' archery team in the 2015 Summer Universiade in Gwangju.
Kim Woo-jin, 24, is the current world number one and the world record holder in men's recurve archery, while Chang Hye-jin, 30, won Olympic gold in both the team and individual archery events at the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The victory took some of the disappointment out of the rest of Taiwan's performance at the tournament. None of the men or women got past the round of 16 in the individual events, and neither the men or women's team made it further than the quarterfinals in the team events.
The Archery World Cup is a circuit of five outdoor events that began this weekend in Shanghai and will also go to Antalya, Turkey, Salt Lake City, Berlin and Rome.
