Archer and coach talk at Tokyo 2020: Putranto 2023

The study looks at how archer and coach communicate during an Olympic final, using the official broadcast. In practice the material is a single match: the Tokyo 2020 women's individual final between South Korea's An San and Elena Osipova, competing for the Russian Olympic Committee. The author picked ten frames in which he saw some exchange and gave each one a label: talking, high fives and shouting, concentration, instructions, self-correction, confidence, applause, a hug.

Counting the labels, two scenes come out as purely verbal, four as purely non-verbal and four as mixed. The author also sorts them by moment: before stepping onto the shooting line words dominate, on the line it is signals without words, and at the end gestures of celebration. His conclusion is that non-verbal communication dominates between the Korean archer and her coach, and that the recurring gesture is the high five, read as congratulations after a good result.

The method is Peircean semiotic analysis, which separates for each image the icon (what can be seen), the index and the symbol (what it means). The video of the final comes from olympics.com; the author took a few screenshots, described them (for instance two people in white shirts facing each other, one with her mouth slightly open) and assigned each a type of communication: verbal, non-verbal or both. Finally he placed the ten scenes in a table according to where the archer stood: off the line before shooting, on the line, off the line at the end.

There are no interviews, no audio, no counts over the whole match and no second observer checking the labels. The paper does not say how the screenshots were chosen.

The title and introduction refer to the individual finals involving South Korean archers, but the results describe a single match, and there were no Koreans in the men's final in Tokyo. Ten frames picked by the author cannot show which kind of communication dominates: without audio it is hard even to tell speech from an open mouth, and some labels, such as concentration or confidence, describe the state of one archer rather than an exchange with the coach. The high five in the conclusion is a fist bump in the table. The study measures no effect of communication on score or performance.

There is little here an archer can use: in an Olympic final the exchange between archer and coach, as far as television shows it, runs mostly through gestures and looks, with a few words before stepping onto the line. It describes one case, seen from outside, and says nothing about whether words or gestures work better or how either affects performance. Anyone looking into communication with the coach in competition will find firmer ground in the interview study with Korean Olympic archers that this paper cites.