Beijing: The women who snapped South Korea's archery dominance has tipped the sport to be the next big thing in China, pointing to similar booms after Olympic breakthroughs in table tennis, volleyball and tennis.
Zhang Juanjuan broke one of the Olympics' longest streaks when she upset South Korean defending champion Park Sung-Hyun last week to win the individual archery gold medal.
Few expected her to do it with Korean women archers winning every Olympic gold since Seo Hyang-Soon first stepped up and took the title at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.
Now that the sport has received positive publicity, Zhang believes its big moment is coming.
"It would be no more than a daydream to make archery as popular as table tennis and volleyball, but with a gold medal in Beijing, it is within reach," Zhang told the China Daily.
"South Korea dominated the field for so many years because archery is a very popular sport among kids and they have a great grassroots foundation."
"South Korea is still a lot stronger than us overall, but as long as we have enough children playing it, we will have an opportunity to overcome them to become a major force in the sport."
Her confidence is buoyed by the fact that Olympic gold medals have historically lifted unpopular sports into the spotlight.
Volleyball became one of China's favorite sports in 1984 after the national women's team won gold at the Los Angeles Games.
Table tennis and diving enjoyed similar booms in the 1990s.
And tennis, previously near the bottom of China's sporting priorities, took off after Li Ting and Sun Tiantian won the women's doubles tennis gold in Athens.
"That gold medal can bring archery more media exposure and marketing opportunities," Zhang told the paper.
"Hopefully our performance at the Games will give fans something to expect from the sport.
"Archery is a very beautiful sport. It's more like a mind game, so it is very good for kids to take up at an early age. It's very physical as well, requiring a lot of strength to control your bow and arrow for such a long distance."
Currently, China has only around 300 registered archers with half the national team coming from the Xibo ethnic minority, a group of just 200,000 living in Heilongjiang province and the Xinjiang region.
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