D’Almeida wears pain from Tokyo for his best version – 02/23/2023 – Sport

Marcus D’Almeida was unable to disguise his frustration as soon as he was defeated by the Italian Mauro Nespoli, on July 30, 2021, at Yumenoshima Park Archery Field, in Tokyo.

The result assured the Brazilian ninth place overall in the last Olympics, the best mark in the history of archery in the country. The result, not even remotely, seemed to satisfy him.

“I come from a place where being among the top ten in the world is f…, but I could go for a medal. And I still can in Paris”, said D’Almeida, minutes after the end of participation in the competition.

Since then, he has used the result as a kind of provocation to himself. Eighteen months later, at the age of 25, the archer reached the leadership of the modality ranking on February 6th. And already dreams of more.

“The defeat in Tokyo hurt a lot, I learned a lot from it. It may seem like something simple, but I really believed that I could have advanced, gone further. My opponent was better, but he won because he had a much more prepared mind”, he says to Sheet.

In the bitter setback, Nespoli opened the dispute scoring 29 points out of a possible 30 – hitting two of the three shots on 10, the maximum score of the target divided by ten colored sectors from 1 to 10. Marcus added 28 in the three attempts.

Behind the scoreboard, in the second half, the Brazilian hit one of the arrows outside the central zone, the yellow one, where the highest score is, letting the opponent open up an advantage. The mistake was repeated twice more in the third and final set.

“There are always many things, but the main point at which I evolved was in mental maturity. I now know what it’s like to have my head 100% there at that moment”, he says.

Since 2015, the athlete from Rio de Janeiro has been monitored by psychologist Aline Wolff, from COB (Brazilian Olympic Committee).

He says, however, that there was no significant change for the Paris cycle, the new moment is summarized in two experiences: that of Tokyo, through pain, and that of Yankton, in the United States, its redemption.

Less than two months after the regretted defeat in Japan, he would win a prized silver medal at the Yankton World Cup, being personally praised by the American Brady Ellison, one of the main references of the sport.

“After all, the Worlds came and then it completed a fundamental turning point. I thought: ‘there’s no way not to believe it now'”.

The mental transformation he prides himself on wasn’t the only change since Tokyo. He stopped being trained by the Cuban Jorge Carrasco and started working in the cycle for Paris with the young Italian coach Alberto Zagami, hired by CBTArco (Brazilian Archery Confederation) in January 2022.

“They are different profiles, but I feel a lot of improvement. He works with very advanced equipment and I insist a lot on the question of strength, of the physique itself”, he explains.

In the hard daily training routine, there are about seven hours in the field – working between 250 and 400 shots in two periods. There is also an hour a day in the gym, in addition to physiotherapy and massage therapy sessions.

The athlete’s physical transformation has taken place since the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima. He won the silver medal weighing 103 kg. A little over two years later, after radically changing his eating habits with the help of a nutritionist, he weighed 83 kg and showed muscle.

It also started to invest in periods of preparation outside the country. It was fundamental, especially, the experiences lived in South Korea, considered the biggest reference of the modality.

“I had recent small technical adjustments, I changed a lot in Korea. Now, the focus is more physical, on having the strength to maintain the level in competitions”, he says.

The evolution was confirmed with the title of the French stage of the World Cup, in Paris, in June last year.

In the final, as in the Olympics, he was behind on the scoreboard, this time to the South Korean Kim Je Deok. He equalized and, in the end, secured victory by hitting the center of the target, while the opponent seemed to succumb to the pressure.

The leadership of the ranking was assured with the unprecedented title of the tournament The Vegas Shoot – indoor competition (closed space) in Las Vegas, in the United States, with another 66 competitors. The victory raised him to 290.5 points, just 0.5 more than second place, South Korean Kim Woojin.

Seen from a very young age as a prodigy in the sport, D’Almeida first picked up a hoop at a CBTArco clinic in Maricá, in 2010, aged 12.

Four years later, he would confirm the huge expectation when he won the silver medal at the Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, China, in 2014.

He was still world junior champion, in 2015, and arrived at the first Olympics, in Rio-2016, with only 18 years old, earning the nickname “Neymar archer”.

“That was something of the Chinese, much for the fever about Neymar. It stayed in the past, nobody calls me that anymore”, he says.

This year, he should go through a period of training in Turkey. Before Paris, the main objective is to win an unprecedented gold in the Pan American Games in Santiago.

More prepared physically and, mainly, mentally, he believes that he will soon be able to write even more of his own name in the history of the modality. This time, no comparisons with the Paris Saint-Germain player. It will only be Marcus D’Almeida.