Brazil Looks to Its Indigenous Tribes for New Olympic Archers

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/brazil-looks-to-its-indigenous-tribes-for-new-olympic-archers/280560/


A member of Brazil's Asurini do Tocantins tribe participates in the II Indigenous Nations' Games of Para, in Altamira, Brazil on August 15, 2005. (Reuters/Paulo Whitaker)


To win Olympic medals, a country needs lots of talent, the resources to train that talent, and the desire to spend those resources, as my colleague Matt O’Brien put it.

As host of the 2016 Olympics, Brazil has plenty of incentive to rake in as much Olympic gold as possible, and with almost 200 million people, it has quite the talent pool, too.

What’s more, the country has discovered that certain segments of its sizeable population come prepackaged with Olympic-worthy skills. Why train new Olympic archers, the thinking seems to be, when some Brazilians have already been shooting arrows since they were the size of a quiver?

A scout named Marcia Lot, from the Brazilian nonprofit Amazonas Sustainable Foundation, has been combing the country’s Amazonian indigenous communities in order to find natural-born archers ages 14 to 19 to train for the upcoming games. She was looking not only for Katniss Everdeen-level aim, according to the British Independent newspaper, but also for the “discipline and character” required to compete in the world’s most important sporting event after, you know, living in the rainforest your whole life.