One Arrow From
The Semifinal Loh Chi Hui Carries a Four-Archer Squad

Loh Chi Hui shot five sets against Wang Xueqian of China in the para recurve women’s quarterfinal at the 5th Asian Para Games and could not be separated from her. Five sets, 5–5. One arrow each to settle it. Both shot an 8. Wang’s was closer to the centre, and with that the best moment of Malaysia’s campaign was over.

Loh had qualified eighth of fifteen with 563 — sixty-seven points behind Wang, who topped the ranking round with 630. She beat India’s Pooja 6–2 in the opening round and then pushed the number one seed to the last arrow the format allows. Sixth place, and nothing in it to apologise for.

The Compound Three Never Started

The other three Malaysians did not survive their opening matches. Julin Wiro, twenty-first in para compound men qualification with 658, lost 143–134 to Iran’s Nori Hadi. Govinda Rajan Daneshen, twenty-second with 656, lost 136–132 to Thailand’s Phiarthanee Teerasak. Nur Jannaton Abdul Jalil, sixteenth in para compound women with 635, lost 134–130 to Chan Yuen Wah of Hong Kong.

The qualification scores tell that story before the brackets do. Zhang Yicheng of China led the compound men with 708; Julin’s 658 was fifty points back. Sheetal Devi of India shot 704 in compound women; Nur Jannaton was sixty-nine behind. These were not narrow eliminations by archers having a bad morning. The gap was there on the practice field.

One Win in the Team Events

The compound men’s doubles produced the only Malaysian victory of the tournament, and it was a decent one. Govinda Rajan and Julin, seeded tenth of ten, beat Chinese Taipei 133–131 in the first round — a Taipei pair that included Yang Jyun-Kai, seventh in individual qualification. India ended it in the quarterfinal, 154–147. Eighth place.

In the compound mixed team, Nur Jannaton and Julin went out 149–146 to Kazakhstan in the opening round, ninth of eleven. Two team events entered, one match won, no quarterfinal survived.

Five Events Out of Fifteen

The hardest number in this report is not a score. Fifteen medal events were contested at Aichi-Nagoya: six individual, six doubles and three mixed teams. Malaysia entered five of them. With no para recurve man on the team, no W1 archer of either gender and only one para recurve woman, there was no recurve doubles, no recurve mixed team and no W1 event of any kind. Ten medal events came and went with nobody Malaysian on the shooting line.

Ninety-nine archers contested the six individual events. Four of them were Malaysian. India, China, Indonesia, Iran, Thailand and Kazakhstan each filled out squads deep enough to contest the doubles and the mixed teams, and that is where the medal count at a Para Games is actually built.

A Different Problem to the Asian Games

Three weeks ago the able-bodied squad came home from this same host city without a medal. That failure had a specific shape: the archers qualified at genuine world level and then lost the matches, four of them by a single point or a shoot-off. The problem was between the ears, not in the scores.

The para squad’s problem sits one stage earlier. Outside of Loh Chi Hui, the scores themselves were not competitive, and the squad was too small to be in most of the events at all. Those are not the same failure and they do not have the same fix. One needs sports psychology and match exposure. The other needs classification pathways, recruitment, and archers in W1 and para recurve men who currently do not exist at this level.

What Comes Next

The ASEAN Para Games that follow Malaysia’s home SEA Games in 2027 will be a shallower field, and on these scores Malaysia should medal there. That is worth saying plainly, and it is also worth saying that it would prove very little. The Asian benchmark is now on the record: 708 and 704 win compound qualification at this level, and no Malaysian para compound archer is within fifty points of it.

Loh Chi Hui’s quarterfinal is the one result in this campaign worth building a four-year plan around. The honest reading of the other eleven entries is that there is not yet enough around her.