Martine Stas-Couwenberg has spent recent months training mostly for field archery, the off-trail discipline where competitors hike between targets pitched at unmarked distances. She did not arrive at a routine double 50/70 tournament in the Belgian village of Minderhout on May 10 thinking about world records. She was not even certain she still had the volume in her shoulders for a long-format target round.
A week and a half later, the Dutch archer was a world-record holder.
Stas-Couwenberg's 1,357 points over 144 arrows in the compound 50+ women's double 50-metre round eclipsed the previous mark of 1,350, set by American Linda Klosterman in Dublin in August 2019. The score has now been ratified by World Archery.
"It wasn't until more than a week later that I discovered it was also a new world record," she said of the achievement. "A very fun and unexpected bonus."
The double 50-metre round is one of compound archery's tougher endurance tests: 144 arrows at the 50-metre line on an 80cm face, scored conventionally with the X-ring as a tiebreaker. A 1,357 from a 1,440 maximum is a remarkable working average across that kind of volume, and a serious benchmark for any compound archer, let alone in the 50-plus age category where day-to-day training loads are usually lighter than on the open senior circuit.
What Stas-Couwenberg did know, in real time, was that she was on a hot day on the field.
"Throughout the competition, I was aware of my scores, and after three completed rounds I already knew that I was going to break the Dutch record," she said.
That Dutch national mark was the obvious target. The world record was not on her radar at all — she had been training largely for field archery, where the discipline of judging distance and reading terrain matters more than the unbroken metronome required for two double 50-metre rounds back to back.
It is the second compound age-group world record ratified by World Archery inside a week, after 17-year-old Simon Moritz of Germany shot a perfect 150 with 11 Xs in München-Garching to break the under-21 men's 15-arrow benchmark that had stood since 2014.
For Stas-Couwenberg, the next set of fixtures takes her back to the field-archery focus she had been preparing for in the first place. Her name, though, will now sit above Klosterman's on the World Archery records page, with a target score she did not even realise she had broken until somebody worked the maths a week later.
"A very fun and unexpected bonus," she called it.
In a sport that often celebrates only the youngest prospects — the teenagers chasing perfect ends, the juniors graduating early into senior teams — it is worth pausing on this one. The current top of the compound 50+ women's double 50-metre table belongs to an archer who turned up to a tournament expecting to scratch off some shoulder rust, was content to know she had a Dutch record in the bag by the third round, and only found out she had set a world record once she'd already moved on to the next session of field-shooting practice.