T&T, rep­re­sent­ed by three male and two fe­male archers se­cured four spots for next year's CAC Games af­ter an over­all im­pres­sive show­ing at the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed Archery World Cup in Medallin, Colom­bia.

The World Cup was the first qual­i­fy­ing event for the CAC Games, and will be fol­lowed by the sec­ond and fi­nal qual­i­fi­er in Guatemala next May, where T&T's re­curve archers will at­tempt to qual­i­fy for the main event in Mex­i­co.

Among the feats record­ed by the T&T archers in last week's event was a new na­tion­al record of 229 points (out of a max­i­mum 240) in a nar­row run­ner-up fin­ish to Venezuela.

The suc­cess­ful men's team in­clud­ed George Vire, Rakesh Sookoo and Has­math Ali. T&T al­so land­ed one fe­male com­pound place for the CAC Games.

Fol­low­ing their suc­cess­es in the team events, the archers moved on­to the in­di­vid­ual elim­i­na­tion event, where they com­pet­ed for ten avail­able places. Sookoo won his en­counter with Bar­ba­dos' Richard Mor­ris 139-133, be­fore Ali scraped past Cos­ta Ri­ca's Juan Car­los Solano in a shoot-off. Solano al­so qual­i­fied with a ninth spot, while Vire se­cured the tenth with the same score as Ali and Solano.

The fe­male com­pound match­es were equal­ly ex­cit­ing with Cezair shoot­ing an­oth­er na­tion­al record of 136 (out of a pos­si­ble 150) to over­come Tere­sa Abreu of the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic in her first match. Cezair and three oth­er archers ad­vanced to the fi­nal stage to shoot for the three places avail­able in this di­vi­sion. Cezair lost to Sab­ri­na Her­mes of Guatemala.

How­ev­er, the two los­ing women had shot the same score and went in­to a 15 ar­row shoot-out to se­cure the fi­nal qual­i­fy­ing place.

The match be­tween Cezair and Es­pinal was a ner­vous af­fair, and even­tu­al­ly wound down to the last three ar­rows with the T&T archer just a few points be­hind. Cezair sub­se­quent­ly held her nerve and shot three nines. Es­pinal shot slow­er and record­ed two tens with her first ar­rows, but with the clock run­ning down could not re­pro­duce this and shot a poor ar­row which saw Cezair win 130-125 to se­cure the last spot for T&T.

T&T's on­ly oth­er fe­male archer Saman­tha Jage­sar shot well in her quar­ter-fi­nal match but ex­it­ed to even­tu­al win­ner Sab­ri­na Her­mes, 127-113.

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