people
Sherab Zam
Sherab Zam (born 10 October 1983) is a Bhutanese archer and coach who represented Bhutan in the women's individual recurve event at the 2012 Summer Olympics, where she carried the national flag at the opening and closing ceremonies. She has since worked as a coach with the national archery team and at Chundu Armed Forces Public School.
Sherab Zam (born 10 October 1983) is a Bhutanese archer and coach. She is best known for representing Bhutan at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, where she competed in the women's individual recurve archery event and carried the Bhutanese flag at both the opening and closing ceremonies. After retiring from competition in early 2014 she has worked in coaching roles with the national archery programme.[1]
Although archery is the national sport of Bhutan and is practised by men in almost every village, the women's discipline at the Olympic level uses the international recurve bow rather than the bamboo and traditional composite bows associated with Bhutanese village tournaments. Sherab Zam is one of a very small number of Bhutanese women to have competed internationally in the recurve format, and her appearance at London 2012 made her the first Bhutanese woman to serve as an Olympic flagbearer for the country.
Note: a separate but unrelated artist sometimes goes by the same name in informal Bhutanese music listings; sources for that figure are thin and unverified, and this article concerns the Olympian, who is the most encyclopedically documented person of the name.
Early life
Sherab Zam was born on 10 October 1983 in Kashithang, in Dagana Dzongkhag in southern Bhutan. She practised informal village-style archery as a child but did not pursue the sport seriously until 2005, when she responded to a newspaper notice advertising trials for the national archery squad. She did not own a bow at the time. She was selected for the women's national team and subsequently trained in South Korea, India and the Netherlands, the last as part of a Dutch-Bhutanese exchange programme that paired her with the senior Bhutanese archer Tshering Choden, who had previously competed for Bhutan at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics.
2012 Summer Olympics
Sherab Zam qualified for London 2012 through an invitation from the Tripartite Commission rather than through the standard ranking pathway, a mechanism that the International Olympic Committee uses to ensure participation from countries with limited high-performance infrastructure. The Bhutan Olympic Committee selected her as flagbearer at both the opening ceremony on 27 July 2012 and the closing ceremony on 12 August 2012.[2]
In the women's individual recurve event she scored 605 in the ranking round, finishing 61st of 64 archers. She was drawn against the United States competitor Khatuna Lorig, the fourth seed in the ranking round, in the round of 64 elimination bracket and was defeated 0-6 in sets, losing the match in three straight sets. Speaking to Reuters before the Games she said that "participation is more important than winning a medal", a statement that received wide coverage in international media as illustrative of Bhutan's broader Olympic philosophy.[3]
Coaching career
In January 2014 Sherab Zam left the senior national squad and moved into coaching. She has subsequently worked as an assistant coach for the Bhutanese national archery team and as a coach at Chundu Armed Forces Public School in Haa. Her coaching work has focused in part on developing girls' and women's archery, an area in which Bhutan continues to have a small competitive base.
References
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