Archery Federation Wants Traffic Diversions at Rio 2016 Games

(ATR) Tom Dielen, secretary general of World Archery, tellsAround the Ringsthe federation wants traffic around the Sambadrome to be diverted during Olympic competition.

Despite few athlete protests, World Archery believes the background noise caused by car horns and traffic is too disruptive to one part of the competition field. Archery's test event at the Sambadrome concludes on Tuesday.

"The noise is a challenge and I think there are solutions that can be found that solve the issues for everyone," Dielen said to ATR.

"The solution we will propose is that during the competitions there is no traffic. The horns are the major challenge, but also for television production if you have a noise in the background it's not good for broadcast."

The Sambadrome is located in the heart of Rio de Janeiro's Catumbi neighborhood and near a major highway. Organizers said they wanted to test the field of play to determine how much the noise would impact archers.

Agberto Guimarães, Rio 2016 sports director, said the decision to move traffic will only be considered after the test event is complete."The last thing we want is to cause disorder in city traffic and prevent people moving freely from one side to the other," Guimarães told reporters.

"The city is a superb partner; we want to preserve that kind of thing. The international federation will send us a report with errors and successes and from there we will make adjustments. We have got the next year to correct any failure to make the event 100 percent the way we imagined."

For athletes competing here in Rio, other more pressing issues are on their minds ahead of potential traffic issues.

"We’re not quite like golf, we don’t need dead silence to shoot a bow. We can get the crowds into it, get them rip-roaring loud. We prefer that," U.S. archer Brady Ellison told ATR.

"The platform on the qualification field, as we have shot during the week, has started to shake. What we understand is they are going to lower it which will make it a lot more stable next year. So I don’t think it will be a problem at all.

Ellison’s teammate Jake Kaminski said the wind conditions inside the Sambadrome are tricky to read, so having more cues for archers to gauge the conditions would help.

"I’m expecting it to be different during the actual event, and we have each country’s flag on top of the stands," Kaminski toldATR.

"That will help us with wind direction. Right now it’s a guess, and it is tough to read, but it's not too bad."

Members of the Brazilian archery team agreed that the platform needs work, but acknowledged this is not the final setup which will be used during the Olympics.

"At some points the platform is rocking more than others," Daniel Rezende Xavier, a Brazilian archer, told reporters.

"In practice, some points of it you feel a ripple. You're standing there peacefully, but if someone is walking behind you it interferes a little. We’re pretty confident that these little mistakes will be corrected for next year and will be all right."

Written by Aaron Bauer in Rio de Janeiro

20 Years at #1: Your best source of news about the Olympics is AroundTheRings.com, for subscribers only.