Another string to his bow

Simon Terry won bronze at Barcelona in 1992 then gave up archery, but now he is back and aiming for a second medal at Beijing

HE WAS one of the most memorable stories of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the Scottish teenager who came from nowhere to win Britain's first archery medal since Dottie and William Dodd hit the bullseye in London 84 years earlier. When it emerged that while he was away representing the nation, the unemployed roofer's £35 a week dole money had been stopped by the DHSS, he became that archetypal British success story, the plucky underdog winning through against the odds, defying age and bureaucratic indifference to land a mighty blow for Blighty. Everyone in the country knew the tale of Simon Terry.

And then, just months after beating defending gold medallist, American Jay Barrs, and Seoul bronze medallist Vladimir Echeev to win the unlikeliest of Olympic bronze medals, he completely disappeared from view. He no longer turned up to practice in the rickety old church hall in Lincolnshire where he had prepared for the Barcelona Olympics, he was no longer a fixture in archery competitions across the country. The 18-year-old who had first honed his skills target shooting in the woods around Crieff 10 years earlier had walked away from the sport which had defined the previous decade of his young life.

But now, unfeasibly, he is back. At the age of 34 and after just three years back in the sport, Terry travels to the Olympics with a genuine chance of adding to that bronze medal he won 16 years ago. Eighth in last year's pre-Olympics competition in Beijing, he was also fourth in last year's world championships in Leipzig, missing out on a bronze medal only when teammate Alan Wells shot a perfect 10 in the shoot-off and Terry shot nine. "Even Alan admits it was a fluke," says Terry. "He knows I'll get him when it really matters, in Beijing."

With the British men ranked No.2 in the team event, Terry, who stands to become Scotland's longest-serving Olympian, has hopes of a podium place in the individual and team events. Nor does he plan to stop there, making plain his intention to compete in both the 2012 London Olympics and the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

But why did he turn his back on the sport in his hour of triumph? Was he really that affronted by the DHSS's ruling that he was "on holiday" in Barcelona and therefore ineligible for benefits? Or did the lack of support and opportunities when he returned home really rankle that much? The reasons for his extended sojourn turned out to be far more ordinary and prosaic.

"Why did I take a step back?" he asked in his soft Brummie lilt. "I suppose I just fancied a change. I needed a bit of time off. Archery was all I'd done since I won my first competition when I was nine. It's all I did, every spare minute; every weekend was taken up with archery. Then I got to 18 or 19 and started to go out with my mates and have a bit of a life. You know what it's like: you think you'll take a little bit of time off but a month becomes a year and by the time you know it a year has become a decade further down the line.

"I chucked it after Barcelona not because I was fed up with what happened there, but just because I wasn't practising enough to be competitive. What happened with the dole money was blown out of all proportion, even if it wasn't that great."

Despite telling one interviewer in 1996 that he would "definitely be in Sydney in four years' time", his break with archery was so complete that he didn't even bother following the fortunes of archers he had known for years. He caught Alison Williamson's performance in Athens in 2004 because he happened to be flicking through the channels at the time. When Larry Godfrey came within a whisker of fourth place in the same Olympics, Terry heard about it on breakfast television. He was, he says, "completely out of the loop".

One of the reasons Terry was so lost to archery was that he discovered another sporting love: racing motorbikes, Suzuki 1000cc bikes to be precise. He says he "wasn't particularly successful and didn't like doing the madder races like the (Isle of Man] TT, which was way too dangerous for me" but the sport still became all-consuming. Even being high-sided and knocked unconscious at the notorious Clearways corner at Brands Hatch couldn't extinguish his love of life in the fast lane. In the end, only the gradual fading away of his biker mates ("it got a bit expensive, so one by one the lads packed it in so they could afford to buy houses or start families, and in the end I was the only one left") persuaded him it was time to return to a more sedate pursuit.

Not that Terry returned to archery with the Olympics on his mind. In fact, he didn't even really want to compete at any more than local level, but his village club had other ideas and he found himself being unwittingly entered for national competitions. He was amazed at how quickly he got back into the swing of things. Despite having equipment almost as ancient as that he used in his Crieff days, when his publican dad hooked him up with his pal Les Bryce who drank in the Terrys' Oakbank Inn pub and owned a little archery shop in the town, Terry was surprisingly competitive.

"I was only 20-30 points off what I was shooting in 1992 and I had the same equipment I had in Barcelona, a 15-year-old bow and 15-year-old arrows. The only thing that was new was the leather pad that goes across your fingers because the old one was so dry and cracked that it was useless."

Once he was back on the circuit things progressed quickly, and when he came within one millimetre of claiming a bronze medal at the European Indoor Championships two years ago despite being hampered by state-of-the-ark equipment, he found himself back in the national team. A working man who was once a roofer, then a welder and is now a lorry driver, initially he found the demands of top-level amateur sport brought the bad memories flooding back as he worked 14-hour shifts and came home to practise each evening. But success brought Lottery funding and, along with a particularly supportive employer, he now has enough time to prepare properly. He has a coach, Hilda Gibson, and has even managed to buy two £1,000 bows for his trip to Beijing.

Once there he will find himself head to head with the Koreans who dominate the sport. In Britain, there are three male archers who can regularly shoot 1300 points (out of a maximum of 1440), the accepted top level for the sport's elite. In Korea there are 135. In Barcelona Terry's run of head-to-head victories was undone by Korea's Chung Jae-Hun, although he was genuinely surprised to even get that far. He qualified 20th and that's roughly where he expected to finish: to get a medal was beyond his wildest dreams and his opponents' worst nightmares.

This time he goes to Beijing as one of the best archers in the world, an acknowledged contender for a medal and a man who believes in himself. He doesn't have to worry about his dole money being stopped, and nor is he forced to stop practising and make way for the badminton players when the village church hall has been double-booked. Ten years off has, he says, completely remotivated him. "This is just the beginning," he says. "I've already got one eye on the London Olympics and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. I feel I've got some lost time to make up for."

Who knows, maybe he will be so successful that one day his countrymen will no longer automatically think of the arrows as the exclusive preserve of that other iconic Scottish sportsman, Jocky Wilson. Now that would be some achievement.