"We are a really strong team": Olympic champion Mete Gazoz hails his team's APL triumph

New Delhi [India], October 13 : Rajputana Royals (RR) won the inaugural Archery Premier League (APL) title on Sunday. Mete Gazoz, an international archer from Turkiye, and RR ace archer hailed his team for winning the title and praised the Indian crowd for the support throughout the tournament.

Gazoz became the individual Olympic Champion at Tokyo 2020, at the age of 22, making him his country's first-ever Olympic archery medallist. He is also the only athlete in history to achieve archery's triple crown - holding the Olympic, world, and continental titles simultaneously.

While speaking to ANI, Mete Gazoz said, "I am proud of my team. We are a really strong team. We won the final match. The atmosphere in India is so good, I love it. So many people come to watch the matches and support them."

He made his Olympic Games debut at Rio 2016. Mete went on to lead a young Turkish team to Olympic bronze at his second Games, Paris 2024. He has a strong connection with competing in Germany, winning the 2023 World Archery Championships in Berlin and the 2024 European Championships in Essen.

The inaugural APL concluded on Sunday with a final between the Rajputana Royals and the Prithviraj Yodhas, in which the Royals held their nerves in a shootoff to be crowned the APL champions.

It was boiled down to a hit-and-miss match in the tiebreaking shootoff, where the two most consistent Royals' compound archers - Ojas Deotale and Ella Gibson - hit the target, while none of the four Yodhas' players found the yellow dot.

But the Yodhas can hold their heads high, not just for giving Royals a tough fight but also for becoming the first APL team to register a perfect rotation of eight arrows in a set, scoring a perfect 80 with all 10.

But still it didn't turn out to be enough despite taking a 4-2 lead, headed by their in-form senior compound archer, Abhishek Verma, who teamed up with Matias Grande, Gatha Khadake and Andrea Becerra.

For the Royals, recurvers Mete Gazoz and Ankita Bhakat partnered with Gibson and Deotale to help their team lift the trophy, having lost just once in 12 matches on their way to winning the title.

The drama started in the first set itself, which ended with one of Khadake's arrows getting upgraded by the judges to give the Yodhas a 78-77 win in the first set.

However, the Royals roared back in the next with a 78-75 margin to square the final at 2-2. The third set saw the Yodhas' archers scripting history by scoring 10s on all eight arrows to win it with an unprecedented scoreline of 80-77.

The match went on a knife-edge towards the end of the fourth set, when Grande needed a 9 to seal the championship for the Yodhas, but he hit an 8 and the Royals won the set 78-77 to make it 4-4, with a shootoff to decide the winner. And Gibson and Deotale did the rest by hitting the shootoff target twice.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor