Archery is the national sport in the Himalayan kingdom. Bamboo and reed have given way to fiberglass, but the passion hasn’t dimmed and the insults still fly. From the Chicago Tribune:
Dorji, a house painter with close-cropped black hair, draws his bowstring, hooks his thumb on his cheek and takes aim at what appears an impossible target: an 11-inch-wide slip of wood dug into the soil 460 feet away — deeper than center field.
He lets his finger slip and the arrow streaks down the field, raising a puff of dust when it hits the earthen bank just behind the target. He has missed.
“His wife keeps beating him! That’s why he’s getting weaker and weaker!” taunt his friends, gathered in a grove of willows along the rocky Pachu River. Dorji, 47, is accustomed to the insults that are a staple of archery in Bhutan, and just ignores them.
[Picture: Bhutanese Olympic archers Dorji Dolma, left, and her husband, Tashi Tshering, practice earlier this year in Thimpu, the capital.]
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